Institutional and political setting
Management of the soil is achieved by several state organizations (General Directorate of Rural Services, Soil and Water Research Institute, Anatolian Agricultural Research Institute, Provincial Agricultural Directorate). Among others Soil and Water Research Institute is particularly authorized for combating desertification. Anatolian Agricultural Research Institute is another experienced structure actually doing successful researches on production of specific seeds suitable to various environments, grassland amelioration etc. The remaining institutions mostly provide extension services to villagers. Three local civil societies can be mentioned in the area of natural resource management: Chamber of Agriculture that normally informs villagers in all aspects of cropping, Agricultural Credit Cooperative that refund villagers in their agricultural activities and Irrigation Union that serve facilitating management and financial aspect of water provision.
TEMA is the only countrywide NGO in terms of desertification that is making significant education efforts of different levels (for pupils, villagers etc.). She sometimes leads reforestation activities and other social projects too.
Within the boundary of the Eskişehir municipality, the ultimate land use decision-maker is the municipality board elected by the city people. Water management mostly is carried out by the local branch of the General Directorate of State Water Affairs and partly by two other state organizations, the General Directorate of Rural affairs and the Bank of Provinces.
The existing law (no: 5403) on soil preservation and land use is effective since 2005. According to law and related regulations, a soil protection board headed by local governor (vali) was formed in each province to provide all kinds of insights on the issues of land use and soil preservation. This structure also is authorized to decide and undertake research on land degradation processes and new soil preservation projects. As a general view of existing legislative situation, the main gap is in the coordination of various institutions and structure related to land use and soil protection. Low capacity of the country in creating multidisciplinary studies, as well as lack of base data and maps on land use and soil protection forms other major bottlenecks.
Extension and training services in the Eskişehir study site are extremely scarce. Villagers quoted that there is no periodic information flow given by related state institutions. As with those institutions, availability of suitable (number, quality etc.) personnel is very rare mostly due to existing state personnel regime (i.e. trend to decrease number of officials). Only some villages received random information flow from Provincial General Directorate of Agriculture. Actually there is an agriculture engineers who stays 2 days in one of the study site villages (Keskin village) to inform villagers in their agricultural practices. Again rarely there are some tradesmen who come to inform (in fact to sell) about chemical fertilizers, irrigation systems etc. More rarely researchers from the Faculty of Agriculture of one of the universities in Eskişehir organize individual irregular informative meetings.
