From legitimization to structured legalization: A governance framework from Türkiye’s 2018 zoning amnesty

Informality remains one of the most persistent challenges for land governance, particularly where large-scale legalization policies seek to reconcile existing development with formal planning and regulatory systems. Although zoning amnesties often generate comprehensive administrative records of informal development, they rarely establish institutional mechanisms capable of transforming legitimization into sustainable legalization. This study examines the implementation outcomes of Türkiye's 2018 Zoning Amnesty and evaluates how they provide the foundation for a governance model for structured legalization. An integrated analytical framework combining spatial assessment, institutional analysis, and policy evaluation was applied using national administrative statistics, orthophoto-based spatial analysis, municipal inventories, zoning-amnesty datasets, and evidence from the environmentally sensitive Uzungöl case study. The findings demonstrate that the Building Registration Certificate functioned primarily as an instrument of institutional legitimization rather than complete legalization, creating a nationwide administrative inventory while leaving critical planning, technical, environmental, and legal issues unresolved. Building on these findings, the study proposes a governance model that transforms administrative legitimization into structured legalization through a sequential institutional pathway integrating legal verification, spatial assessment, technical and environmental assessment, and administrative integration. The proposed model offers a transferable approach for more transparent, adaptive, and risk-informed land governance in countries facing similar challenges of large-scale informality.