Why Aren’t There More Cooperative Housing Construction Projects? An Analysis of Responsibility Framing in Post-Disaster Housing Recovery in Türkiye

As Türkiye continues to recover from the devastating 2023 Southeastern Anatolia Earthquakes, housing shortages and limitations of conventional post-disaster housing models have become increasingly evident. Lessons from previous disasters point out the value of alternative solutions like cooperative housing. Yet, despite acknowledged benefits, their implementation remains minimal. Here, we examine why cooperative housing remains underrepresented in Türkiye’s disaster recovery by analysing discursive framings of responsibility articulated by various actors and their interactions with existing legal and institutional contexts. Employing critical discourse analysis, we conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with representatives of cooperative housing groups, professional chambers, and local authorities, along with a corpus of 135 policy documents, professional reports, academic articles, and press materials covering the period from the 1999 Marmara Earthquake to the second anniversary of the 2023 Southeastern Anatolia Earthquakes in 2025. Findings reveal that dominant narratives emphasising rapid, centralised, and standardised state-led reconstruction significantly restrict the emergence and institutional acceptance of cooperative housing alternatives. We highlight persistent institutional barriers and tensions between official disaster governance discourses and local experiences. Theoretically, this analysis demonstrates how discursive framings shape governance outcomes, illustrating the ways hegemonic narratives limit the acknowledgement of alternative practices. Practically, we advocate targeted regulatory reforms and strengthened institutional support mechanisms to transform abstract calls for participation into actionable cooperative housing policies and practices.