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Megaprojects are large-scale and long-term investments. Three pillars of sustainable construction objectives, namely, social, environmental and economic, should be integrated into megaproject risk management to ensure long-term success. A risk assessment method, Risk Assessment Method for Sustainable Construction Objectives in Megaprojects (RAMSCOM), was developed for this purpose.

RAMSCOM was developed based on the latest concepts and identifying relevant and critical sustainability objectives and risks through an extensive literature review. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Cross-Impact Analysis (CIA) were used to determine and quantify the threats regarding the importance of the sustainability objectives. The applicability of RAMSCOM was demonstrated on a real megaproject.

The findings revealed that sustainability risk assessment requires integration of economic, environmental, social objectives and analysis of cross-impacts of risk factors. Visualization of interrelated threats, vulnerabilities and objectives has a potential to support risk mitigation decisions to achieve sustainability goals.

The method has been developed based on the findings from a detailed literature survey on sustainability objectives and risks. RAMSCOM was tested on a single project with the assistance of three experts' views. Findings from the case project cannot be directly generalised for various megaprojects considering the unique nature of megaprojects.

Decision-makers can use RAMSCOM to assess sustainability risks in megaprojects and develop risk management plans for the most vulnerable and important sustainable objectives in a visual and quantified approach to ensure megaproject's sustainability in the long-term.

The theoretical contribution is a novel risk assessment method that integrates all dimensions of sustainability and quantifies the vulnerability of sustainability objectives considering their priorities, interrelations and risks. Sustainability dimensions, objectives and risks used in RAMSCOM can be useful for other researchers aiming to develop similar methods.

Over the last four decades, Turkey has built an elaborate social assistance regime, which provides extensive coverage of the poor but lacks some of the key characteristics of European minimum income protection systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore what ideational roots underlie the regime and how these ideas and paradigms historically shaped the structure of the regime. The paper focuses on two central social assistance legislations: the social pensions law of 1976 and the Law that established the Fund for the Encouragement of Social Cooperation and Solidarity in 1986.

Based on a discursive institutionalist approach, the paper combines a qualitative content analysis of parliamentary debates and official reports with a policy analysis of social assistance legislations in Turkey.

The paper shows that two competing policy paradigms shaped the ambivalent structure and design of Turkey social assistance regime: a welfare state paradigm and a state-organised charity paradigm. The welfare state paradigm, which perceives social assistance as a social right, was dominant in the 1970s and is embodied in the social pension programme. The state-organised charity paradigm, which aims to reinvigorate the Islamic tradition of charitable foundations (waqf), was dominant in the 1980s and is embodied in the Fund for the Encouragement of Social Cooperation and Solidarity. Today’s social assistance regime combines both elements in a curious synthesis.

The paper contributes to comparative social policy research and discursive institutionalism by uncovering the historical and ideational foundations of a largely neglected case, social assistance in Turkey.

Ports are the key elements of maritime transportation, which is crucial for world trade. Approximately 180 port facilities are located in Turkey. After 2007, 5 of the ports, which are formerly owned by Turkish Republic Railways Administration (TRRA), are privatized. The aim of the study is to evaluate the performance of these privatized ports by multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach.

The application process is performed by a MCDM model. This model includes both criteria (dry bulk, liquid bulk, general cargo, container, RO-RO capacity, total port area, total berth, total berths length and depth) and alternatives (Mersin, Samsun, Bandirma, Iskenderun and Derince Ports). It determines the weights of the criteria by entropy and ranks the alternatives by ARAS and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods.

The results of entropy, ARAS and TOPSIS methods are compared. According to these results, “container” is the most important criteria while Mersin port has the best performance.

In the literature, most of the studies about this subject were analyzed by data envelopment analysis (DEA) and there are no studies had been taken into consideration ports that are owned by TRRA, in Turkey. Moreover, few of these studies used integrated MCDM models, and this is the first study that integrates entropy, ARAS and TOPSIS methods in this field.