Representational lock-in and the depoliticization of seismic risk in Turkish earthquake governance since 1999

This article examines how seismic risk has been problematized in Turkish earthquake governance since the 1999 Marmara disaster. Drawing on Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ framework, it introduces representational lock-in: the self-reinforcing dynamic by which a dominant technical problem representation generates institutional forms that entrench it across governance cycles, foreclosing alternatives through structural rather than discursive means. Attributing seismic risk to structural deficiency and regulatory non-compliance, this representation renders unproblematizable the conditions producing urban vulnerability: construction-sector capital accumulation, the imar affı (construction amnesty) regime, and informal urbanism. Reading Laws 4708, 5902 and 6306 as successive stages of lock-in, and the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes as a moment of crisis, it shows that the inadequacy of Turkish earthquake governance is not a story of technical failure but of a problem representation whose reproduction is structurally guaranteed at the level of problem constitution.