I’m Gaye Erkan, a project management consultant and team leader. For over 20 years I’ve helped public institutions and international funders plan, deliver and report on EU and donor-funded projects.
Most projects struggle at the hand-overs: from idea to proposal, from contract to start-up, from activities to results. I work across every stage, so nothing gets lost between them.
Needs analysis, stakeholder consultation and problem definition.
Logical framework, budget, risks and a fundable proposal.
Tender documents, technical offers and contract negotiation.
Team leadership, work plans, procurement and stakeholder relations.
Indicators, reporting to the contracting authority and early warning.
Lessons learned, results reporting and sustainability planning.
For ministries, public agencies, development agencies, international funders and the consulting firms that deliver technical assistance.
Leading technical assistance projects from inception to final report.
Processes, procedures and institutional capacity for public bodies.
Turning priorities into well-designed, fundable projects and winning proposals.
Practical support under IPA and sectoral operational programmes.
Recent news and writing on project delivery in the public and development sectors.
The climate framework is in place. The harder part is delivery.
Taking on team leader, key expert and advisory roles from the UK.
Five things evaluators look for, from someone who has written and assessed them.
Tell me what you’re working on and where you need support.
Get in touchI help public institutions and international funders turn plans into projects that deliver.
For more than twenty years I’ve worked where policy meets practice: in the projects that turn public priorities and international funding into real results. Most of that time has been on EU-funded technical assistance, working alongside ministries, development agencies, municipalities and civil society.
I’ve led project teams, shaped proposals and built the systems that keep programmes on track. Along the way I’ve learned that good projects rarely fail for lack of ideas. They stall when roles are unclear, planning is thin, or the people delivering them don’t have the right tools. That’s where I focus.
My work has spanned employment and social policy, civil society, climate action and regional development. Today I work independently from the UK and join projects on mission wherever they are.
Whether you’re preparing a tender or already delivering, I’m happy to discuss where I can help.
Get in touchI take on team leader, key expert and advisory roles, either directly with institutions and funders or as part of a consulting firm’s team.
Leading projects so that activities, budgets and people stay aligned with the results the funder expects.
Suits: technical assistance projects, institutional programmes, multi-partner projects.
Helping public bodies and their partners work more effectively, with processes and documents people actually use.
Suits: ministries, agencies, municipalities and umbrella organisations.
Turning policy priorities and local needs into well-designed projects, and the proposals that win funding for them.
Suits: public bodies seeking funding, consulting firms bidding for tenders, NGOs.
Practical expertise in how EU-funded programmes work, from the contracting authority’s requirements to day-to-day delivery.
Suits: beneficiary institutions, operating structures and TA contractors.
Designing and running grant schemes, from guidelines for applicants to closure, for programmes ranging from a few dozen to several hundred projects.
Hands-on training that leaves people able to do the work themselves. I’ve trained more than 1,000 staff and beneficiaries.
Describe the project and the gap you need filled. I’ll tell you honestly whether I’m the right person for it.
Get in touchNews on current assignments, events and availability.
Support to the COP31 presentation of the European Union-funded Technical Assistance Project for Achieving Net Zero Emissions in the Transport Sector in Türkiye.
I’m taking on team leader, key expert and advisory roles on EU and donor-funded projects, working from the UK and on mission where needed.
I completed my role as Team Leader on the Technical Assistance for the Implementation of the Employment, Education and Social Policy Sectoral Operational Programme, which I led from December 2024.
Practical notes on designing, winning and delivering publicly funded projects.
What the UK got wrong in the 1980s, what it got right in the power sector, and what it means for Türkiye.
The climate framework is in place. The harder part is delivery.
Five things evaluators look for, from someone who has written and assessed them.
What Türkiye has done so far, and what it still needs to do before COP31.
Two decades of pre-accession funding changed how public projects are planned, funded and managed.
Where projects go off track, and the early signs to watch for.
Most technical proposals don’t lose because the team is weak. They lose because the evaluators can’t see, quickly enough, that the team understands the job.
Evaluators read many offers for the same tender. Generic paragraphs about the sector stand out for the wrong reasons. Refer to the specific institution, its current situation and the constraints in the terms of reference, and show how they shape your approach.
A good methodology connects each activity to a result and each result to the project purpose. If an evaluator can trace that line on one page, you’ve made their job easier, and they notice.
Listing “delays in beneficiary approvals” is not risk analysis. Explain why it might happen on this project, how you’ll see it coming and what you’ll do about it.
Expert days, activity timing and reporting milestones should fit together. Inconsistencies between the work plan, the methodology and the staffing table are among the easiest points for an evaluator to deduct.
Evaluation committees work through long documents against a grid. Use the grid’s headings, keep paragraphs short and put the key point first. Clarity is not a style choice here; it’s a scoring advantage.
If you’re preparing an offer and want an experienced review before submission, get in touch.
A personal reflection. The views expressed are my own.
In September 2024, the UK became the first G7 country to stop generating electricity from coal. Behind that milestone lie two very different transitions: one that was barely managed at all, and one that was planned. Working between the UK and Türkiye, I find the contrast between them one of the most useful guides to getting a just transition right.
Since the miners’ strike of 1984–85, more than a quarter of a million British miners have lost their jobs. The closures came fast and with little planning for what would replace them.
The consequences have lasted for decades. Research by Sheffield Hallam University found that between 1981 and 2004 the coal industry lost around 222,000 male jobs, while only about 132,000 new male jobs were created in the same areas. It took twenty to thirty years for job numbers to recover, and many of the new jobs were poorly paid. Much of the unemployment was hidden: large numbers of redundant miners moved onto incapacity benefits and disappeared from the official jobless figures.
Forty years on, the gap is still visible. The State of the Coalfields 2024 report found that former coalfields have just 57 employee jobs for every 100 working-age residents, against a national average of 73. More than half of employed residents work in manual jobs, and hourly earnings are 6–7% below the national average.
The lesson is stark. When a transition is left to happen on its own, the cost is paid by whole communities, over generations.
The end of coal power tells a different story. In 2013, coal still generated 38% of Britain’s electricity. By 2018 this had fallen to 5%, and by 2023 to about 1%. The government set out its intention to close all coal power stations in 2015, giving operators, workers and the grid a clear timeline. On 30 September 2024, Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire closed, ending 142 years of coal-fired electricity. Its owner plans to turn the site into a carbon-free technology and energy hub.
A clear end date, alternatives ready to take over and a plan for the site: none of this makes a transition painless, but it makes it far more manageable.
The UK’s current challenge is oil and gas. The closure of the Grangemouth refinery in Scotland in 2025, with around 400 jobs lost, became an early test. The UK and Scottish governments put together a joint support package, including a training guarantee and up to £10 million for skills support to help workers into clean energy jobs.
Even so, Scotland’s Just Transition Commission called it a disorderly closure and a warning of how difficult and expensive a transition becomes when it is handled reactively. A House of Commons committee later described the local employment shock as avoidable. Researchers at Robert Gordon University have warned that job losses in the wider North Sea sector could be equivalent to a Grangemouth closure every two weeks.
The response is now more structured. The government’s North Sea Future Plan, published in November 2025, includes a North Sea Jobs Service to help workers assess their skills, identify career pathways and access training. Whether it delivers will depend on whether clean energy jobs arrive quickly enough, and in the right places.
Türkiye is at an earlier stage, but the parallels are clear. Its coal workforce is small nationally but concentrated in a few regions, such as Zonguldak, Soma and Afşin-Elbistan, where it is central to the local economy. Six lessons from the British experience stand out:
The learning can flow both ways. Türkiye’s experience of running large-scale employment and skills programmes, built over two decades of EU-funded projects, offers practical know-how in delivering support on the ground.
With COP31 taking place in Antalya, the UK and Türkiye will both be at the centre of the climate conversation this month. Britain’s story shows that ending a high-carbon industry is achievable. It also shows that the people and places affected will remember how it was done long after the last plant closes.
If you’re working on just transition, employment or regional development programmes, in the UK or internationally, get in touch.
A personal reflection, drawing on my work in employment and social policy programmes. The views expressed are my own.
In November, Türkiye will host COP31 in Antalya. Much of the debate will be about emission targets and climate finance. At home, though, the green transition will be judged by a simpler question: what happens to the people whose jobs, skills and communities are affected?
A just transition is about making the shift to a low-carbon economy fair. It means protecting the workers and communities most exposed to change, creating decent new jobs, and sharing both the costs and the benefits of the transition across society.
Since July 2025 this idea has a place in Turkish law. The Climate Law (No. 7552) names just transition among its guiding principles and defines it as policies that include everyone, giving priority to those most likely to be affected, such as children, women, older people and persons with disabilities, while managing employment impacts and creating new jobs.
The foundations are being laid. Alongside the just transition principle, the Climate Law asks the Ministry of National Education and the Council of Higher Education to update curricula to prepare a green workforce. The National Employment Strategy for 2025–2028 places skills for the green and digital transitions among its priorities.
The pressures are real, but uneven. Coal mining employs around 40,000 people, only about 0.2% of the national workforce. In places like Zonguldak, Soma and Afşin-Elbistan, however, coal is the backbone of the local economy, and these jobs pay well above the national average, with strong job security and high union membership. They will not be easy to replace.
The transition also reaches far beyond coal. Since January 2026, the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism has been in its definitive phase, putting a price on the carbon in imports of steel, cement, aluminium and fertilisers. For Türkiye, as one of the EU’s major industrial suppliers, that means changes in production methods, skills and jobs in its exporting industries.
Civil society and research institutions are active too, producing regional analyses and guides for coal regions and bringing public bodies, unions and local actors together to discuss the way forward.
Principles in law are a starting point. Turning them into results will require practical steps:
Türkiye already has strong tools for this. Over many years, EU-funded programmes in employment, education and social policy have supported active labour market measures, vocational training and social inclusion across the country. The institutions, procedures and partnerships built through them, with İŞKUR, municipalities, schools, universities and civil society, can now be directed towards the green transition.
In my experience, well-designed grant schemes are particularly useful at this stage. They allow local actors to test new approaches, such as green skills training in coal provinces or employment support for women in emerging sectors, and generate the evidence needed before national programmes are scaled up.
Hosting COP31 gives Türkiye a global platform. A clear and credible approach to just transition, backed by concrete programmes rather than principles alone, would strengthen its voice in Antalya. More importantly, it would help make sure that the move to a low-carbon economy brings the people most affected along with it.
When I started working on EU-funded projects in the early 2000s, terms like “logical framework” and “call for proposals” were new to most institutions in Türkiye. Twenty years later, they are part of everyday public sector language. That shift didn’t happen by accident.
Between 2002 and 2020, Türkiye received around €9.2 billion in EU pre-accession funding. It was the largest beneficiary of the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA), taking nearly half of the total in the first period (2007–2013) and a quarter in the second (2014–2020).
The money mattered, but so did the conditions attached to it. Every euro came with rules on how projects should be designed, contracted, monitored and reported. Thousands of people in ministries, municipalities, universities and civil society had to learn those rules, and many of them kept using them long after a particular project ended.
A shared language for projects. Project Cycle Management and the logical framework became the common way of thinking about projects. Today a ministry official, a development agency expert and an NGO coordinator can sit at the same table and talk about objectives, results, indicators and assumptions in the same terms. That common language is one of the most underrated legacies of EU funding.
Transparent, competitive grant-making. EU grant schemes introduced a model that was new for many institutions: published guidelines for applicants, open calls, independent assessment of proposals against set criteria, and standard contracts. When Türkiye set up its 26 regional development agencies under Law No. 5449 in 2006, their financial support programmes followed a very similar approach, with dedicated units for programme management and for monitoring and evaluation.
Specialised institutions and units. Managing EU funds required new structures: central contracting and finance units, operating structures for sectoral programmes, and EU project units inside ministries and agencies. These teams built expertise in procurement, financial management and programme management that has spread across the public sector.
A habit of monitoring and reporting. Interim and final reports, indicators, monitoring visits and visibility rules made accountability part of the routine. It wasn’t always popular, but it changed expectations: a project is now expected to show what it achieved, not just what it spent.
A professional community. Perhaps the biggest change is in people. Two decades of EU projects created a generation of Turkish project managers, trainers, evaluators and consultants. Many now work with other funders and in other countries, bringing that experience with them.
It would be misleading to describe this only as a success story. The European Court of Auditors, reviewing EU assistance to Türkiye in 2018, found projects generally well designed and delivering their outputs. In my experience, though, outputs are not the same as lasting change. Three weaknesses stand out:
The funding landscape has changed. The current IPA III period (2021–2027) has a total budget of €14.2 billion, shared among all candidate countries on a “fair share” basis, and other funders such as development banks and climate finance are playing a larger role. Priorities are shifting too, towards the green transition, net zero and resilience.
That makes the project management capacity built over the past twenty years more valuable, not less. The challenge now is to keep the discipline EU funding introduced, while making it lighter, more results-focused and more firmly owned by Turkish institutions themselves.
If your institution or organisation is preparing or delivering a donor-funded project and needs experienced support, get in touch.
On 9 November, Antalya opens COP31. Most of the attention will be on the negotiations. For Türkiye, though, one of the clearest tests of climate ambition is much closer to home: how people and goods move around the country.
Transport produces roughly a sixth of Türkiye’s greenhouse gas emissions, and most of it comes from road traffic, particularly freight. The sector’s emissions roughly tripled between 1990 and 2019, and oil still supplies almost all of the energy it uses. Across the whole economy, emissions rose by 5.3% in 2024 to 584.5 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent.
Transport is also harder to change than a power plant or a steelworks. Its emissions come from millions of vehicles, thousands of operators and dozens of public bodies, from ministries to municipalities. No single policy can fix it.
Over the past two years, Türkiye has put much of the policy architecture together:
The market is moving too: electric vehicles made up around 17% of new car sales in 2025.
Strategies don’t cut emissions; projects do. In more than twenty years on EU-funded projects, including leading the İklimIN climate action project, where we trained stakeholders in 20 provinces and supported 37 grant projects run by municipalities, CSOs and universities, I’ve seen that the hardest part is rarely writing the strategy. It is turning it into a pipeline of well-prepared projects, each with an owner, a budget and a way to measure results. In transport, three gaps stand out.
Local capacity. Much of the practical work, such as bus fleets, cycling infrastructure, parking policy and urban logistics, sits with municipalities. Now that local climate action plans are mandatory, many will need support to turn those plans into fundable transport projects.
Project preparation. International funders want to finance sustainable transport, but they need projects with clear objectives, credible feasibility work and realistic procurement plans. Weak preparation is one of the most common reasons good ideas never reach implementation.
Data and monitoring. With emissions trading and NDC reporting, institutions will need reliable data on transport emissions and on what their projects actually achieve. Without a baseline and good indicators, results are hard to prove and harder to scale.
COP31 will put Türkiye’s climate commitments in front of a global audience. Its most lasting effect, though, may be at home: if the attention it brings turns into well-prepared, well-managed transport projects, the 2035 and 2053 targets become far more credible.
If you’re working on transport or climate projects in Türkiye and need support with project design, management or capacity building, get in touch.
Send a short note about your project. I’ll reply within two working days.
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London, United Kingdom