A Critical Analysis of Cash-Based Aid and the ESSN in Turkey

Date

2024-9

Author

Küçükkaya, Yasin Emre

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This dissertation provides a critical analysis of the Emergency Social Safety Net Programme (ESSN), the world‘s largest humanitarian cash assistance initiative. Established as a response to the large-scale displacement of Syrian refugees, the ESSN exemplifies a new breed of EU-funded aid projects in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) since 2016. Moving beyond its goal of fulfilling basic needs, the study scrutinizes the variegated dynamics underpinning the program. The ESSN‘s conditionalities, design, implementation and performance as a poverty reduction initiative become central to the study. Employing a qualitative methodology and multimethod approach including budget analysis, textual analysis and thirteen semi-structured interviews, the dissertation evaluates the program‘s congruence with refugees‘ rights to food, work and dignified treatment. It assesses how the ESSN‘s progression has passed through various modes of neoliberal governance, involving multiple processes from donors to end-users. Furthermore, it also highlights how these types of initiatives and their budget-making practices play into the expansion of an increasingly growing aid industry, particularly through overhead costs and other extracted benefits. The study deciphers the ESSN as a strategic instrument enabling the EU‘s externalization of migration governance to Turkey while shedding light on the neoliberal governance dynamics within the Turkish context. Integral to this analysis are the roles of international organizations, especially the WFP with their technocratic skills in engineering and legitimizing practices through market-driven logics. Ultimately, the study opens a dialogue on the systematic and institutionalized nature of global poverty and inequality, disrupting the narratives suggesting that these are merely inadvertent occurrences.

Subject Keywords

ESSN, Poverty, Aid industry, Externalization, Right to food

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/111426

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis