Understanding the Enthusiasm of Vocational Education and Training in Turkey: Social or Liberal Reasons?

Turkey has become a significant case for discussions on the political economy of neoliberal transformation in later-industrialising countries. It was one of the few emerging economies that managed to attain an ‘inclusive growth’, where economic growth and social development occurred together. This was attributed to the ruling party’s (Justice and Development Party- AKP) ‘social neoliberal’ character, through which it could create benefits for both the winners and losers of neoliberal transformation. In fact, the AKP followed a neoliberal economic agenda where most policies were based on increasing the competitiveness in global markets. On the social side, it was claimed that the AKP focused more on ‘productive’ social policies as opposed to ‘protective’ ones and these benefited different groups of its electoral constituencies, meaning the business and the lower segments of society. Significant increase in public spending in productive social policies and important improvement in various social development indicators were observed. Although bringing significant contribution to the understanding of the AKP and the political economy of social policies, previous studies focused on quantitative indicators, which was mainly spending. Nevertheless, this kind of analysis causes one to overlook a number of important characteristics of those social policies. Therefore, this article aims to fill this void and understand the content of those policies, and their real beneficiaries. It focuses on one area of productive social policies, the system for creating technical skills, namely the vocational education and training (VET) policies at the initial and continuing levels. It conducts a process tracing of the policy- making where it analyses the role of a number of influential actors. Further, it conducts content analysis of the policy documents, as well as of the projects and programmes developed in this regard. The analysis shows that the business sector, the European Union and the World Bank heavily influenced the development of VET policies while the actual participation of labour was negligible. This resulted in a neoliberal discourse in policy documents where VET policies were closely linked to business’ needs and social aspects of VET were rarely mentioned. The resulting projects and programmes associated with VET conformed to this ideological orientation. They focused on generating more general skills in line with business’ interests and adaptable to future economic changes, which in turn produced important benefits especially for the small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The sole focus on business interests and the absence of those of labour in the policy-making process of VET point to a much more "conservative neoliberal" policy orientation, rather than "social" that allegedly informs these policies.