Overview of the books

Esra Çeviker Gürakar’s book provides a qualitative and quantitative analysis on the public procurement system in Turkey from the JDP’s ascension to power in 2002 until 2015. Her study qualitatively details the changes and continuities in legal and institutional underpinnings of the public procurement system before and after 2002: she problematizes Turkey’s previous State Procurement Law, which was in force between 1983 and 2003, detailing the criticisms related to its institutional framework, legal scope, publicity requirement, assessments of qualifications of bidders, bid evaluation, and contract awarding mechanism, as well as the appeals process. She contrasts the previous law with the stipulations of the new Public Procurement Law, prior to and after its amendments in the following years. Additionally, she presents a rigorous quantitative analysis of all high-value public procurement contracts, defined as contracts with a value above 1 million TL, awarded between 2004 and 2011 across different sectors to approximately 14,000 firms. In doing so, she relies on a range of primary sources including, but not limited to, legal texts, business association membership lists, the Trade Registry Gazette, and targeted media sources including local newspapers. In other words, the labor of journalists working in regional newspapers, for example, makes Çeviker Gürakar’s study possible. The book’s intended audience is primarily an academic audience, particularly scholars interested in institutional economics, political economy, and political science. To the best of this author’s knowledge, Çeviker Gürakar’s quantitative analyses, in which she collaborated with Tuba Bircan, are the first of their kind. While incidents of “favoritism” or “corruption” in public tenders have long been investigated by journalists, she is the first scholar who approached this issue with a consistent methodology, to effectively demonstrate the workings of “favoritism” in the distribution of public tenders in Turkey after 2002.

Çiğdem Toker’s Kamu İhalelerinde Olağan İşler investigates the Turkish government’s increasingly routine application of a particular clause in the Public Procurement Law, originally intended for use only in select circumstances. Hence, Toker and Çeviker Gürakar’s works have inherent overlaps due to their focus on legal and institutional changes underpinning the public procurement system after 2002. Turkish Public Procurement Law stipulates that there are three procedures for the implementation of public tenders: open procedure, restricted procedure, and negotiated procedure (Toker Reference Toker2019, 30).Footnote ⁴ Article 21 lays out the terms of the negotiated procedure. Toker specifically examines the application of paragraph b of Article 21, which states that negotiated procedure may be applied when “it is mandatory to urgently conduct the tender due to sudden and unexpected events such as natural disasters, epidemics, risk of loss of life or property, or events that could not be foreseen by the contracting authority” (Kamu İhale Kanunu 2002).Footnote ⁵ Other clauses of Article 21 elaborate on other circumstances (such as tenders for urgent defense and security contracts) under which negotiated procedure could be applied (Kamu İhale Kanunu 2002). Under the terms of Article 21/b, public tenders do not need to be openly advertised; instead the state invites at least three firms that it chooses to the tender (Toker Reference Toker2019, 31). Toker’s main argument is that “the Justice and Development Party abuses the power it has been entrusted with for private gain by often and widely implementing paragraph b of the negotiated procedure in public tenders” (Toker Reference Toker2019, 18). Toker builds on the definition of corruption provided by Transparency International, namely “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain,” which she interprets as “a relation, a process,” one that is “inevitably linked with the capitalist class” (Toker Reference Toker2019, 15). In this regard, she utilizes what is arguably an elusive definition, one that is assumed to have a universal set of meanings, in order to make her own case (Pierce Reference Pierce2016, 4–20). For Toker, corruption does not mean illegality. Instead, she traces the ways in which the Public Procurement Law has undergone transformations in content, interpretation, and implementation, allowing for “abuse of entrusted power” at the hands of individuals in the JDP for the “private gain” of a select group of companies. She further argues that the redistribution of public funds as a result of the application of Article 21/b has increased project costs, and that “the invitation of a limited number of companies restricts competition from the outset, resulting in high contract values against public [benefit], and [that] this framework has impacted the use of budgetary sources,” in a way that has resulted in long-term negative effects (Toker Reference Toker2019, 19). Toker’s book represents a call by a seasoned investigative journalist for greater public accountability in the face of repeated abuses of a legal and institutional process that has facilitated the misuse of public funds, unequal redistribution of capital, the exploitation of labor, ecological damage, and the destruction of cultural heritage and memory.

Toker’s second book, Şehir Hastaneleri, complements and builds on the investigations conducted in her first. Toker investigates twenty-seven so-called “city hospitals,” using them as a lens to analyze the neoliberal transformation in health care in Turkey over the last two decades. City hospitals occupy vast spaces and are generally built outside of urban city centers. They entail a spatial transformation of the land on which they have been built. Concomitantly, the inner-city districts that housed the former state hospitals (some of which are then closed as part of the agreements under which the new city hospitals are built) are also physically and economically transformed, with significant implications for the livelihoods of people in their neighborhoods (Toker Reference Toker2022, 53–59, 108, 208–209). Their establishment also impacts societal spatial imaginings and navigation of the city on a day-to-day basis. As the political scientist Omar Sirri has noted, “beyond dynamic and shifting urban mobilities are the more static, arguably more permanent urban architectures, like residential and commercial buildings,” and additionally in this case, buildings in which public services such as health care are provided (Sirri Reference Sirri2021, 15). Thus, the establishment of the city hospital, and the spatial transformations it brings about, has direct implications for hospital administrators, health workers, and patients, as well as for laborers that work in non-health care sectors within these premises. Toker sporadically elaborates on such multifaceted impacts and implications of city hospitals in her work, while her main investigative focus remains on their legal and financial foundations.

Toker conducts a detailed investigation of the legal and financial underpinnings of the establishment of Turkey’s “city hospitals.” Between 2009 and 2020, tenders for eighteen city hospitals were implemented and contracts signed under the PPP’s BLT model (Toker Reference Toker2022, 46–47, 254–255). Since 2020, Article 21/b of the Public Procurement Law, the very clause she investigated in her first book, has provided legal justification for the tenders and contract values of an additional nine city hospitals (Toker Reference Toker2022, 252–253). Toker argues that the BLT model resulted from the “financialization of public services” and a process of “speedy multidirectional industrialization in health services” (Toker Reference Toker2022, 34). The physical infrastructure of the city hospital complicates, dilutes, and diffuses precise responsibility for the various functions carried out within it; this is the multi-directionality to which Toker refers, arguably a feature that was originally engrained in the contractual logic of PPPs (Hanieh Reference Hanieh2013, 55). Her discussion of “financialization” is intertwined with three components – costs, risks, and revenues – and it constitutes one of the recurring themes of the book.Footnote ⁶ She highlights the role of (international and national) finance in helping to bring the concept of the city hospital to life. It is frequently claimed that one of the main benefits of the BLT model of PPPs is that the contracting government department does not need to provide the necessary capital upfront (“the investment cost”) for the implementation of major infrastructure works. In this instance, in exchange for the private capital owners providing the necessary capital and bearing the financial risk associated with the construction of the facility, the Turkish state has agreed to become the lessee and to make payments in installments to the private company – a contractual bond that will end after twenty-five years, after which time the company relinquishes its rights to the contracting government department. Toker concludes that this financing model rendered the Ministry of Health a market buyer of health care services (Toker Reference Toker2022, 47). According to her calculations, the investment cost of eighteen city hospitals, built via BLT, was $11 billion (Toker Reference Toker2022, 51). By the end of 2022, fourteen of these (with an investment cost of approximately $8.1 billion), were operational (Toker Reference Toker2022, 48–49, 59).

The international dimension of the establishment and operation of city hospitals raises further questions about the financial and juridical sovereignty of nation-states in the neoliberal age. The international movement of capital and the establishment of international institutions of arbitration are both characteristics of neoliberal policies that allow international capital and organizational power to impact institutional changes at the national level (İslamoğlu Reference İslamoğlu2002; Pamuk Reference Pamuk2012, 310). Even if not stated in those exact words, Toker intermittently draws the attention of her readers to this broader point. Toker highlights how PPPs as a legal framework applied to the health care sector were “exported” from Britain to Turkey, and from there to Ukraine, Pakistan, and Iraq, as Turkey “established a study group with Ukraine, reached the level of signing a mutual understanding agreement regarding PPPs with Pakistan, and organized a workshop for experience transfer in Iraq” (Toker Reference Toker2022, 187–188). She reports on the intellectual origins of such “knowledge-transfer” across nation-state borders, although her focus remains on the transformation within Turkey in the 2000s. Toker raises further questions about the broader implications for Turkish juridical sovereignty, drawing attention to a 2015 legal amendment, in which Turkey removed the requirement for any legal disputes pertaining to city hospitals to be dealt with by Turkish courts, paving the way for any such arbitration to take place in London (Toker Reference Toker2022, 138–139). To emphasize the importance of this point, and how it undermines Turkey’s financial and juridical sovereignty, Toker attempts to draw historical parallels between the capitulations and concessions of the late Ottoman Empire and twenty-first-century PPPs in the neoliberal age. However, her definition of concessions (imtiyaz) (Toker Reference Toker2022, 217–218) is historically inaccurate, since they could be assigned to both Ottoman subjects as well as to foreigners and, furthermore, her unmethodical comparison is rather anachronistic. The deployment of an inexact historical parallel between the late Ottoman concept of imtiyaz and the PPPs is also unfortunately rather common in academic works (Civanoğlu Reference Civanoğlu2022, 362; Emek Reference Emek2009, 9). This final discussion weakens the otherwise strong foundations of her work. However, her broader intention in drawing this historical analogy, namely emphasizing the city hospitals’ impacts on Turkish financial and juridical sovereignty, remains highly pertinent and necessitates further journalistic and academic scrutiny.

Toker’s books speak to her consistent investigative labor towards shining light on these topics over the course of seven years. While her first book is a compilation of approximately eighty articles written between 2016 and 2019, the second book is a compilation of seventy newspaper articles, authored between 2015 and 2022, with an additional new section. Not that differently from select academics, Çiğdem Toker assembled her own “archive of sources” (Pursley Reference Pursley2019, 28). She relies on her own interviews, parliamentary minutes, Court of Auditors reports, Public Tenders Observation reports, state officials’ speeches, records from the Trade Registry Journal, and records from the İstanbul Chamber of Commerce, as well as reports by international bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the European Commission, among others. In select cases, Toker may not have had the opportunity to cross-check her findings against other sources, since the tenders pursuant to Article 21/b were not publicly announced when they opened. Instead, she considers the absence of official disavowals or of requests for corrections to her articles from officials in both the public and private sectors to be a tacit acknowledgement of the accuracy of her reporting. Her second book’s primary sources are broadly similar to those used in her first, with two distinctions. Toker relies on the emerging secondary literature and benefits extensively from statements and reports issued by the Turkish Medical Association (Türk Tabipleri Birliği), a key non-governmental organization that seeks public accountability for this broader transformation that has such an immediate impact on its own members. However, the key primary sources for any discussion of city hospitals, the very contracts on which such PPPs came to exist, are inaccessible, categorized as “trade secrets” (Toker Reference Toker2022, 53, 64, 224).Footnote ⁷ Again, Toker works around this glaring impediment with her usual meticulousness by, for example, studying the Court of Auditors reports. In short, she scrupulously attempts to ensure the accuracy of her reporting while bringing previously undisclosed information to public attention even though she does not have the benefit of hindsight or increased levels of primary sources that may be available to scholars in the future who may choose to conduct further research on this topic.

The primary goal of Ümit Akçay’s book is to analyze the dynamics that shaped the political economy of Turkey between 2018 and 2023 by studying the composition, decisions of, and change in the “power bloc” (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 15). The power bloc comprises of the state, understood as the military and civilian bureaucracy, the government and the political parties, and the bourgeoisie, comprised of different fractions of capital (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 28–32). Notably, the period that Akçay focuses on marks the implementation of the presidential system in Turkey. Akçay’s narrative weaves the transformations in the political economy of Turkey with the election results of presidential elections in 2018 and 2023, parliamentary elections in 2018 and 2023, and local elections in 2019 and 2024. The book’s theoretical framework builds on two strands of literature: critical state theory and the growth models perspective. Akçay argues that the period between 2018 and 2023 was not necessarily marked by an economic crisis per se, but by a crisis where multiple alternative growth strategies competed with one another. Akçay relies on newspaper articles, the statements of state officials and business organization leaders, and various economic data collected from the Turkish Central Bank Database, World Bank, and Reserve Economic Data, which are visually presented to the reader as graphs.

Akçay’s other self-proclaimed goal is building a connection between academic knowledge and the mainstream discussions on media platforms that have shaped public opinion. Having structured his book in a manner that is more readily accessible to a wider audience, Akçay himself suggests that his readers who are “not too interested in theoretical discussions” to skip Chapter 2, which details his theoretical framework (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 17). The book’s intended audience therefore includes the broader public as well as scholars and students of critical political economy, economy, political science, and sociology (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 16–17). While Akçay stipulates that what distinguishes his academic study from journalistic narratives is his consistent reliance on a theoretical framework (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 23), he in effect criticizes, if not dismantles, many predominant narratives repeated by select journalists and commentators on media platforms on the causes and consequences of the shifts in the political economy of Turkey in recent years, not least thanks to this methodical implementation of a theoretical framework. For example, in a swing at oft-repeated mainstream discourses, he argues against the idea that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won the 2023 election because there was not an appropriate oppositional candidate who could win the elections against him. Instead, Akçay points to the lack of a conversation on the opposition’s proposed economic policies, which he believes contributed to Erdoğan’s electoral success (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 172, 173).

Starting with the institution of the presidential system after the presidential and parliamentary elections of June 2018, Chapter 3 focuses on the currency crisis that transpired in 2018. Akçay argues that the measures taken after the currency crisis prompted the formation of what he calls “the low interest coalition” in 2021 (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 86). Chapter 4 discusses the collaboration formed between the Turkish government and select capital owners, particularly representing those that Akçay categorizes under “other capital groups” (diğer sermaye gruplari), during the COVID-19 pandemic. He contends that the Turkish government chose to not entirely “close the economy” and, instead, control the impacts of the pandemic mainly through instruments of monetary policy because of this collaboration. As Akçay’s conceptual framework does not treat the capital owners as a united class, Chapter 5 dissects the period between 2021 and 2023 into three sub-periods to show the competition among alternative growth strategies that different capital owners pursued. In Chapter 6, Akçay turns his attention to the consequences of the economic policies implemented between 2021 and 2023 and the failure of the political opposition to capitalize on the biggest “cost of living crisis” experienced in Turkey in recent memory. Chapter 7 focuses on the dynamics behind the reinstatement of Mehmet Şimşek as the Minister of Finance and Treasury and analyzes Şimşek’s economic program in comparison with previous economic programs pursued by Kemal Derviş and Nureddin Nebati. In Chapter 8, Akçay argues that none of these three economic programs, which are embodiments of two growth models, brought welfare to the larger sections of society. In addition, he not only details the mainstream narratives in Turkey that suffer from economic and political reductionism but also expounds on the global context of “polycrisis” in which these economic policies have been and are being shaped.

Differentiating among capital owners and their interests

In their respective studies, Çeviker Gürakar and Akçay treat private capital owners differently, which is reflected in their choice of analytical frameworks that, in turn, inform their respective academic analyses. Both scholars emphasize the importance of accounting for sectoral differences in their analyses. By contrast, a systematic implementation of a theoretical framework is largely absent in Toker’s works. Instead, her investigations directly or indirectly elucidate the role of private companies, with a strong emphasis on those in the construction sector, and for a good reason. Until the 1980s, the Turkish state had prioritized industrialization in the context of its import–substitution–industrialization policies but as the focus shifted to export-led growth policies, public resources began to be assigned to the construction sector. The construction sector was perceived as a sector that stimulated economic growth, due to its intense intersectoral nature as well as its capacity for job creation and development of public infrastructure (Balaban Reference Balaban and Bora2021; Türem Reference Türem, Adaman, Akbulut and Arsel2017, 31–36). Thus, this section of the review article reflects on how each author addresses and differentiates among miscellaneous capital owners, including domestic and foreign capital owners, to better understand the various facets of political economy in Turkey under the rule of the JDP. In particular, I focus on the Turkish state’s relationship with capital owners in different sectors more broadly, and the construction sector in particular.

Building on Mara Faccio’s definition of “politically connected” and the broader literature on politically connected firms, Çeviker Gürakar places tender-winning companies in six categories: those directly “politically connected to the JDP”; directly “politically connected to opposition”; politically affiliated with the JDP; politically affiliated with opposition; foreign firms; and “other firms.” Accordingly, “politically connected to the JDP” are the firms whose one or more shareholders include a JDP member of parliament (MP), a JDP local official, a first-degree relative of a JDP MP or a local official, or an individual who has “ideological kinship” such as the board members of politically connected media channels or Islamic charities (Çeviker Gürakar Reference Çeviker Gürakar2016, 78). In addition, Çeviker Gürakar examines indirect connection to the JDP by analyzing “political affiliations” of firms, meaning the firms’ membership patterns with what the author characterizes as “Islamic business associations,” namely MÜSİAD (Independent Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association), ASKON (Anatolian Lions Businessmen Association), TUSKON (Turkish Businessmen and Industrialists Confederation), and TÜMSİAD (All Industrialist’s and Businessmen’s Association). By contrast, Çeviker Gürakar distinguishes the firms directly “politically connected to opposition” as well as their indirect connections with opposition based on their membership patterns in TÜSİAD (Turkish Industry and Business Association) and TÜRKONFED (Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation). She treats TÜSİAD and TÜRKONFED as business associations that “are not known to have harmonic relations” with the ruling party. Based on this differentiation, Çeviker Gürakar shows that over 1,200 contract-awarded firms were directly connected to the JDP and over 1,300 firms had political affiliation with the JDP, with some overlap between these two not mutually exclusive categories. This finding is key to her argument that shows “favoritism” in the JDP era. It should nonetheless be noted that 9,787 domestic firms categorized as “other firms” are the bulk of the contract-awarded firms in her study, which speaks to the limitations of her analytical framework (Çeviker Gürakar Reference Çeviker Gürakar2016, 76, 82–83). Considering that public tenders are viewed as a way to support domestic SMEs, a more subtle point emerges in her findings on the role of foreign capital. Despite the structural advantages that the public procurement system offers to domestic companies, Çeviker Gürakar also shows that 475 foreign firms also won procurement contracts in Turkey, especially in cases that necessitated advanced technological know-how (Çeviker Gürakar Reference Çeviker Gürakar2016, 76, 81–82). This finding and the related brief discussion is quite important: it illuminates the extent to which Turkey’s public procurement system imposes limits on foreign capital and constrains its power, despite the pressure on the Turkish state on opening the state procurement system to foreign capital.

By contrast, Akçay does not primarily distinguish among private companies on the basis of a (perceived or real) religio-cultural affiliation although he also emphasizes the importance of business associations due to their role in helping organize the capital owners and their interests. He argues that “the image of cultural opposition is functional to the extent that it serves as a carrier of material opposition” (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 52). In contrast to other critical works that treat capital owners as a united class, Akçay builds on Marx’s discussion of “many capitals”: he differentiates between “established large groups of capital” (yerleşmiş sermaye gruplari) and “other capital groups” across twelve different parameters under four main headings, which include the scale of the firm, the types of labor that the firms use, their priorities in political economy, and their design of growth model (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 54–63, Table 1 on 57). He emphasizes that “established groups of capital” differ from many among the “other capital groups” in their access to credit in foreign currency, and, by implication, the related risk they are exposed to, which is a determinant in different groups’ expectations and demands from the Turkish state (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 56–60). Growth strategies, which are embraced by official institutions and reflect the hegemonic positions in the power bloc, are defined as strategies that “design the road map for transition from one growth model to another” (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 38–39). Akçay’s main argument is predicated on the idea that there can be situations in which more than one growth strategy can exist simultaneously. Changes in growth models do not happen during times of “economic crisis,” which the author defines as an economic recession longer than six months, or by short-term financial shocks caused by economic cycles; instead, they happen during times of structural crises (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 43). Therefore, Akçay states that the periods of structural crises are precisely the periods during which alternative growth strategies, reflecting differing agendas of capital owners, come to be discussed (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 34, 43). Accordingly, the tensions among simultaneous multiple growth strategies show the struggles among different capital fractions that are included in the power bloc (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 40).

In differentiating among private companies, both Çeviker Gürakar and Akçay face the issue of how to approach sectoral differences. Çeviker Gürakar presents a table on the sectoral distribution of procurements (understood as “goods, services, and construction”) according to contract value groups (Çeviker Gürakar Reference Çeviker Gürakar2016, Table 4.2 on 88). She shows that most of the politically connected firms, and particularly the firms with direct political connection to the JDP, do not tend to be active in the manufacturing sector, but rather in services and construction (Çeviker Gürakar Reference Çeviker Gürakar2016, 89). Hence, her findings underline the difficulty in replacing these large-scale manufacturing companies, which may be TÜSİAD members, in rent distribution (Çeviker Gürakar Reference Çeviker Gürakar2016, 87–89). For Akçay, sectoral analysis is “critical” in understanding the different interests of the capital-owning class and, hence, their preferences on growth strategies in Turkey (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 54). This matter goes to the core of what they need the state’s economic policy to be for them to retain or increase their profit margins. The issue’s analytical treatment becomes particularly curious in Akçay’s discussion of holding companies, which may be invested in different sectors of the economy. Akçay argues that holding companies “reflect the interests of the sectors that they receive their chief revenues from as a part of their own profitability strategies” and what matters for his analysis is the scale of such companies (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 48). Hence, he arguably underemphasizes the potential problems and contradictions within holding companies that may emerge as a result of sectoral differentiation. As Akçay’s analytical framework builds on not only conflict among capital owners but also class conflict, his eloquent differentiation among private companies speaks to sectoral differences and the role labor plays in different sectors (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 54–56). Accordingly, he argues against the discourse, repeated both in Turkish and international media outlets, that Erdoğan pursued “heterodox” monetary policy, meaning that lower interest rates will lead to lower inflation, due to his religious beliefs. Instead, Akçay stipulates that the different interests of capital, informed by sectoral differences, led to the formation of “the low interest coalition,” an alliance between the ruling party and those companies in the construction sector, SMEs, other sectors that are labor intensive such as textiles as well as the banking sector, against the demands in the “established groups of capital” (excluding the banking sector) (Akçay Reference Akçay2024, 137–138). While Akçay’s analysis allows for such sobering arguments, the present author was left wondering about the position of the defense and aerospace industry, may it be in the context of Akçay’s discussion of “premature deindustrialization” and reindustrialization or otherwise, especially in light of the increase in Turkish exports in this sector in recent years (Ongun Reference Ongun2025). Furthermore, in February 2023, earthquakes in Turkey and Syria killed tens of thousands and left millions homeless. The World Bank estimated that the disaster has cost $34.2 billion in physical and structural damage (Akman Reference Akman2023). While illuminating, Akçay’s analysis fails to account for the impact of the 2023 Turkey and Syria earthquakes, or the reconstruction effort that followed, on the Turkish economy and the subsequent elections.

Instead of providing a cross-sectoral analysis, Toker’s first work focuses heavily on the construction sector. As already mentioned, Gürakar’s study also points to the importance of the construction sector, especially for the JDP: she quantitatively proves that construction projects’ share in total value of procurements increased from 39 percent in 2004 to 57 percent in 2011 and that rent distribution in construction favors the politically connected firms (Çeviker Gürakar Reference Çeviker Gürakar2016, 74, 89). To inform the public on the workings of this predilection, especially as it relates to the implementation of Article 21/b, Toker meticulously details how Article 21/b of the Public Procurement Law began to be implemented for tenders to the General Directorate of Highways for the construction of public roads, cases that arguably neither necessitated an “immediate” tender, nor fell under the definition of being in response to an “unexpected and unforeseen event.” Article 21/b was increasingly utilized by other government agencies as well. These included the Ministry of Justice (for the construction of prisons) and the Ministry of Transportation (for the construction of subway lines to the recently built “mega project” of İstanbul Airport). It was adopted by the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization, and Climate Change, for the construction of the Supreme Court of Appeal building, and by the Housing Development Administration, for the development of the so-called “Nation’s Garden in Ankara,” not to mention the Turkish State Railways, the General Directorate of State Hydraulic Works, and numerous municipalities and governorates across the country. Not only has Toker compiled a detailed list of tenders implemented under the terms of Article 21/b between May 2013 and September 2019, but she also identifies the nineteen individual companies that have benefited from them. This information has been brought to the public domain because of her extensive investigative labor, conducted over many years. Toker argues compellingly that the application of Article 21/b has now become routine or commonplace under the rule of the JDP through such examples, as construction-related tenders came to comprise a large proportion of the total value of state procurements.

While Toker’s second book also lists the exact companies that completed PPP agreements with the Turkish state in the case of city hospitals, the opaqueness surrounding the PPP agreements due to their categorization as “trade secrets” as well as the state’s avoidance of officially calculating related risks in its accounting pose a major impediment to academics, journalists, and the broader public in precisely understanding or analyzing changes in the Turkish state’s relationship with domestic and foreign capital owners as it relates to these agreements as well as the PPP agreements’ decades-long financial consequences for the Turkish state and the broader public (Güngen Reference Güngen2020; Toker Reference Toker2022, 254–255). Precisely to begin to illuminate this process and its implications, Toker’s second book compares and contrasts PPPs with the public procurement system in the case of the construction and establishment of city hospitals. Toker questions if this form of financing, the BLT model of PPPs, when applied to city hospitals, lessens the cost on the public finances, and answers with a resounding “no.” According to her calculations, the investment cost of eighteen city hospitals, built via BLT, was $11 billion (Toker Reference Toker2022, 51). By the end of 2022, fourteen of these (with an investment cost of approximately $8.1 billion), were operational (Toker Reference Toker2022, 48–49, 59). Toker goes on to highlight a number of very questionable incentives associated with city hospitals constructed through the BLT model. One such arrangement in particular stands out. Toker claims that many private companies may have covered the cost of their investments primarily through credit arrangements. Although the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development emerges as a key international actor in the financing of city hospitals (Toker Reference Toker2022, 64), details of which international financial organizations or banking institutions are involved, to what extent, and in what manner, were not made sufficiently clear for this reader. This book therefore feels like the beginning of a much larger discussion that will impact Turkish society for years to come. To make matters worse, it is alleged that some private companies entered into credit arrangements denominated not in TL, but in foreign currency. She goes on to allege that the contracting government office (the Ministry of Health in this case) implicitly agreed to pay the borrowing costs incurred by those companies entering into PPPs.Footnote ⁸ The Ministry of Health agreed to indirectly shoulder the currency risk of these private loans by calculating an “operation fee” (kullanım bedeli), which was included in the rent that it paid to the private companies involved, based on averages of the consumer price and domestic producer price index (Toker Reference Toker2022, 61). This decision may have had devastating financial consequences in the Turkish context, especially considering the impacts of the 2018 currency crisis. However, any calculation of the levels of risk to which the Turkish state has been exposed appears to this reader to be a trickier matter. The aforementioned indices are ultimately calculated and released by the Turkish Statistical Institute, an institution that has drawn criticism in recent years for its practices, and, in addition, the PPP contracts could have been amended as the 2014 legal amendment had allowed contracts to be modified in the case of force majeure and extraordinary circumstances. In any case, according to Toker, the implementation of public tenders for the construction of city hospitals via the highly problematic Article 21/b may in fact be comparatively less of a burden on the public treasury than BLT has turned out to be. She cites the fact that when calculated in US dollars, the cost per bed of those city hospitals established through PPPs is more than double that of those built via Article 21/b (Toker Reference Toker2022, 72–75). Echoing Toker’s analysis, Ümit Akçay had also highlighted in an earlier newspaper article the controversial guarantees the Turkish state provided to private companies in PPP agreements (in the example of city hospitals or otherwise), including the provisions that transfer the currency risk from the private companies to the Turkish state (Akçay Reference Akçay2016). Unfortunately, the extent to which, if any, the Turkish state’s prior assumption of the currency risk embedded in the PPP agreements played a role in shaping the political economy of Turkey between 2018 and 2023 is not fully clear to this author in Akçay’s more recent analysis. The immense difficulty of assessing the implications of such opaque processes should not be underestimated, and, for this exact reason, such difficult topics emerge as key areas for potential collaboration between academics and journalists.