Governing ageing in Türkiye: medical authority, individual responsibilisation and everyday negotiation of later life

This article investigates how ageing is governed and experienced in Türkiye by analysing the perspectives of physicians and middle-aged adults, as well as their interactions. Adopting a combined meso–micro approach, it draws on semi-structured expert interviews with physicians and focus groups with middle-aged adults to examine how ageing is defined and how the governing rationalities of ageing are formed, negotiated and contested in practice. At the meso level, medical professionals act as key gatekeepers of governance in ageing, translating welfare restructuring and adapting biomedical ageing discourses while navigating market dynamics, familialist cultural norms and individual responsibility for self-care into their everyday clinical encounters. The positionality of the physicians is not simply a reproduction of existing global and national policy logics, but also involves professional discretion, market impact, internal negotiations and bioethical tensions. At the micro level, the article explores how middle-aged adults engage with the governance of ageing, interpret medical advice in relation to their embodied experiences, respond to social inequalities and perceive later life. Findings indicate that middle-aged adults respond to the dominant ageing discourses neither as straightforward compliance nor as open resistance. Instead, the resistance takes the form of adaptation, reinterpretation and everyday renegotiation. The article thus demonstrates how ageing is produced simultaneously as a site of regulation and a field of potential contestation. This synthesis contributes to global debates on ageing governance by highlighting the relational processes through which inequality, responsibility and agency are negotiated in later life, offering insights relevant beyond the Turkish context.