Turkey's experience with microcredit: the new governmental strategy

Abstract

Microcredit delivery to the poor in order to encourage them to involve in income-generating activities or develop their micro-enterprises emerged as a survival strategy on the basis of the assumption that the poor can survive on their own. Given that the poor as self-sufficient market actors are considered to be able to involve in entrepreneurial activities, microcredit represents a new conception of fight against poverty rendered to a matter of availability of financial resources for the poor. Credit recovery is secured not through guarantee or collateral but rather through formation of solidarity groups among credit receivers and maintenance of peer-pressure. This thesis examines microcredit delivery as a new governmental strategy defined by the transition in the conception of development from the direct provision of social services in order to secure the welfare of citizens to empowerment of the poor in order to enable them to survive on their own. In this sense, microcredit delivery represents reconstitution of the social as market spaces subjected to determination of market actors rather than bureaucratic intervention of the state. This approach to microcredit delivery that allows for focusing on forms of knowledge and techniques rendering the poor to object of government and hence problematizing poverty as a governmental concern transgressing the limits of purely economic categories enables to consider penetration of daily forms of life by global power structures.