Integrated in design, divided in practice: politics of child labor in Türkiye

Abstract

Integrated policy strategies appear as an innovative solution for the contemporary policy issues and inherent problems of contemporary public policies. Growing scholarly interest in policy integration reveals the actor-driven and dynamic nature of policy integration. However, this awareness remains limited to the policy formulation stage. Accordingly, a vast amount of research handles policy integration as the end-all to effectively deal with contemporary policy issues at all stages of the policy cycle. Nevertheless, integrated policy strategies are not perfectly immune to the potential challenges of the policy implementation process. The inherent cross-sectoral and multiactor structure, accompanied by varying levels of policy ambiguity, is common for both multi-sector and sectoral public policies. In this context, bridging the two bodies of literature on policy integration and policy implementation becomes particularly promising to analyze policy integration in practice. Therefore, this thesis aims to advance the state of the art by exploring which combinations of product policy ambiguity and policy conflict produces policy integration at the implementation stage following Matland's (1995) model of implementation. This study relies on a comparative case study based on semi-structured interviews from four cities selected from Türkiye with a particular focus on combating child labor in seasonal agriculture. Based on an analysis of the different combinations of different levels of policy ambiguity and policy conflict, this study proposes four worlds of product integration at the implementation stage: experimental, symbolic, political, and administrative. It shows that policy integration in implementation is a different object than in design, which necessitates an analysis of policy implementation rather than policy design. The thesis explores the four worlds of politics of implementation despite uniform policy design in each. In doing so, this thesis introduces a concept of perception of policy ambiguity considering its subjective and context-based characteristics. It also operationalizes both concepts, namely policy ambiguity and policy conflict, through interview data. Finally, it suggests ambiguity-driven sectoral conflict as a new form of sectoral conflict.