Green Populism and Constructed Environmentalisms in Turkey: Discourses Adopted by Turkey's Government to Present Itself as the True Environmentalist in the Face of Critiques


Kutay Kutlu, York University

Turkey has pursued an aggressive developmentalist policy throughout the 2000s, involving various infrastructure projects and construction-based growth throughout the country. However, some of these projects have drawn environmentalist critiques and met with grassroots resistance, epitomized by the Gezi Park protests of 2013, which started as a protest to preserve an urban green space in Istanbul, eventually spreading across the whole country. In the face of this legitimacy crisis, the governing party felt the need to reinstate its hegemony through adopting various green populist discourses consisting of various constructions of what constitutes ‘genuine environmentalism’. This paper will focus on these discourses used by Turkeys governing party to construct a public image of itself as the entity truly representing green values, instead of the ecological activists. It will benefit from a variety of sources such as books authored by bureaucrats and prominent figures from Turkeys government, policy documents, official statements, and news reports. This paper finds that the first aspect of Turkeys governing party’s green populism is referring to services aimed at improving services in fields such as urban environmental quality, waste management, and water management to present itself as genuinely green. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan refers to the efforts during his term as Mayor of Istanbul back in the 1990s, along with actions of subsequent mayors from his party, as signals of genuine environmentalism. In this context, built environments such as parks or recreational areas in urban spaces are cited as being evidential of the government’s environmentalism, notwithstanding the fact that some of these being already existing forested areas in the peripheries of the cities that are redeveloped into parks. Secondly, Turkey’s governing party, particularly through First Lady Emine Erdogan’s initiative, have launched “The Zero Waste Project”, aimed at reducing waste generation. The project is promoted in not only national, but also international circles and summits. In 2023, the United Nations Secretary General has announced the establishment an Advisory Board on Zero Waste, with Emine Erdogan acting as the Chair. Thirdly, Turkey’s government promotes tree planting campaigns, boasting about the record number of saplings planted across the country. These campaigns serve a dual purpose. On the one hand, the government is able to mobilize masses through constructing an understanding of environmental citizenship. On the other hand, these campaigns are aimed at generating the perception that deforestation caused by large-scale infrastructural projects are compensated for through afforestation in other locations. Fourthly, the government also grounds its environmentalism through cultural and religious references. These discourses are oriented around the argument that according to the Islamic faith, the environment has been entrusted to humans. Thus, the governing party, embodying a conservative stance, claims that they are inherently environmentalist by virtue of their commitment to traditional Islamic values. The governing party also appeals to Ottoman Empire legacy, which according to them also involves demonstrating special care to environmental cleanliness and preservation of trees, water resources, and natural species. However, a closer look at the governments policies reveals that far from being genuinely addressed, most environmental problems have been dislocated at most to rural geographies, with their impacts being even further aggravated over time. Results from Yale Universitys Environmental Performance Index (EPI) demonstrate that even though Turkey fares relatively better by means of environmental health, the country lags far behind regarding ecosystem vitality and climate policy. This illustrates that the ecological footprint of urban activities is dislocated to the countryside through infrastructures such as power plants and dams. One should also bear in mind that the environmental health data mainly relies on official measurements regarding air and water pollution, and that studies point to lack of effectiveness in government monitoring in these fields. Experts also dispute the impact of Turkey’s waste management and afforestation efforts. All things considered, this paper concludes that even though Turkey’s government attempts to portray itself as having a genuinely environmentalist agenda, the country’s environmental performance suggests that the officials’ constructions of environmentalism amount little more than populist discourses aimed at retaining legitimacy in the face of ecological dissent.

This paper will be presented at the following session: