Local entrepreneurialism, state re-scaling and scalar strategies of *representation: The case of the city of Gaziantep, Turkey

This study examines the links between the recent rise of localities as significant and strategic loci of policy-making and the changing place of the capitalist state in political economy and its spatiality. The city of Gaziantep, located in the Southeastern part of Turkey, constitutes its empirical focus. Gaziantep started to industrialise rapidly from the 1980s onwards, a period during which neoliberal policy reforms began to be implemented in Turkey. This led many scholars and policy-makers to see Gaziantep, and similar cities called Anatolian Tigers, as a successful model of local entrepreneurialism, which replaced the state's active involvement in economic development.;It is shown that the roots of the current local bourgeois activism go deeper into the Keynesian pre-1980 period. State re-scaling in Turkey during the post-1980 era, at best, facilitated the emergence of Gaziantep as an entrepreneurial city. The study also indicates that the growth in the local policy-making capacity comes about also as a result of scalar strategies of representation employed by the local business associations to overcome the obstacles to the local accumulation strategy posed by the national accumulation strategy and the associated state re-scaling. Here, the main concern of these business associations is not simply to bypass these obstacles. They, indeed, seek to re-shape and mould the scalar strategies of intervention and internal organisation of the state to their advantage, and thus are actively involved in the state re-scaling process as state-builders.;Benefiting from the scale literature, urban regime theory, and studies on business associations, this study offers an alternative explanation, especially emphasizing the political dimension to local entrepreneurialism. Neil Brenner's conclusion, that entrepreneurial local governance is a medium and expression of the re-scaling of the capitalist state constitutes the departure point. The thesis argues, however, Brenner's emphasis on the changing spatiality of the state has to be supplemented by investigating the emerging forms of representation of this re-scaled state. Thus, the concept "scalar strategies of representation" is introduced to examine in what ways the broader state re-scaling process contributes to the formation of local agency and how this agency influences the state re-scaling.