Urban sustainability transition in Turkey: drivers and barriers

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the drivers and barriers of urban sustainability policy transfer through a case study in Turkey. We show that increased opportunities for collaboration between the international and local actors, when local demand exists, can encourage municipalities to espouse sustainability discourse and in turn implement sustainable infrastructure projects, breaking institutional inertia. However, we argue these bottom-up attempts have limited transformative impact unless the central government enacts the necessary legislation and regulation to provide local governments with the authority and tools to pursue urban sustainability. These findings provide an important perspective into forces driving the localization of sustainable development goals.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article examine les moteurs et les obstacles au transfert des politiques de durabilité urbaine à travers une étude de cas en Turquie. Nous montrons que des opportunités de collaboration entre les acteurs internationaux et locaux, lorsque la demande locale existe, peuvent encourager les municipalités à adopter le discours de la durabilité et mettre en œuvre des projets d’infrastructures durables, brisant l’inertie institutionnelle. Cependant, nous soutenons que les tentatives ont un impact limité à moins que le gouvernement central ne promulgue la législation nécessaire pour fournir aux gouvernements locaux l’autorité et les outils nécessaires pour poursuivre la durabilité urbaine.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy transfer
• sustainability transition
• local governments
• emulation
• learning

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Özgür Kazaklı and Aygen Torun for their contribution to the research for this article. Begum Ozkaynak, Hande Paker, Mine Eder, and Mert Arslanalp have provided valuable comments and helped improve the paper. The usual caveat applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Sustainability transition refers to “more sustainable modes of production and consumption” (Schmidt and Sewerin 2019, 1).

2 Localization is defined as “the politics of local actors ‘importing’ foreign norms and then reshaping them to fit into local discourses and knowledge systems” (Alger and Dauvergne 2020, 155).

3 In Turkey, local administration consists of the provincial administration, municipality, and village. The former is headed by the governor and is appointed by the Ministry of Interior. Municipalities “are governed by three components: a mayor, an executive committee, and a municipal council. The mayor and the councilors are directly elected by voters every five years. The executive committee is elected from among the councilors and is in charge of managing the local government under the leadership of the mayor” (Kadirbeyoglu 2020, 69). Overall, the municipalities in Turkey have been under the administrative supervision of the central administration even though they have broad jurisdiction over, among others, providing construction licenses, and delivering services on infrastructure, utilities, public hygiene, and public transportation. In the case of Turkey, there are many accounts of mayors being very powerful—the “strong mayor model”—and councils ending up being very weak in terms of decision-making capacity (Bayraktar 2007). “Within this model, council meetings are usually not the arena where deliberation takes place: instead, many of the important decisions are made in commissions and are simply voted through a show of hands” in the actual council meeting (Kadirbeyoglu 2020, 69).

4 Local governments from different opposition parties are not affected to the same extent from the process of democratic backsliding. Hence, the mayors from HDP (People's Democratic Party), the opposition party associated with Kurdish movement, experienced disproportionally more suspension upon corruption or terrorism charges.

5 Waste collection, street upkeep and hygiene, building licenses and implementation plans are the responsibility of district municipalities while metropolitan municipalities are in charge of development plans, approve the implementation plans prepared by district municipalities, implement public transport through metropolitan public transport master plan, deliver water and sewer services, build squares, boulevards and main roads, provide firefighting and emergency services (Kadirbeyoglu 2020).

6 Even though Izmir has districts that are predominantly focused on agricultural production and the municipality has sustainability projects for this sector, this paper focuses mainly on the sustainability of urban infrastructure.

7 Covenant of Mayors is a global network of more than 11,500 cities and local governments from 142 countries around the world. The population they represent is around 1 billion people. https://www.globalcovenantofmayors.org/who-we-are/ (accessed 1 January 2023).

8 Re-naturing of cities refers to the creation of green roads, recreational areas, and carbon sinks.

9 European Green Capital Award “recognizes and rewards local efforts to improve the environment, and thereby the economy and the quality of life in cities” (https://ec.europa.eu/environment/europeangreencapital/).

10 https://www.ebrdgreencities.com/about.

11 https://www.ebrdgreencities.com/news-events-and-publications/ebrd-lends-izmir-125-million-to-build-new-metro-line/ (accessed 1 January 2023).

12 Tunç Soyer was previously the mayor of a district of Izmir called Seferihisar that became the first Citta Slow in Turkey.

13 City councils are different from municipal councils and became mandatory following the Municipal Law of 2005. They are designed to encourage public participation in decision-making at the municipality level (Sosay and Kadirbeyoğlu 2019).

14 Landscape Planners Association is an Ankara based civil society organization.

15 Buntaine, Parks, and Buch (2017) indicate that countries may be aiming at the wrong targets like simply promising to reorganize their institutions because reaching desired outcomes are more difficult to achieve and they have to signal to international donors that they have reached their targets in order to be eligible for future funds.

16 See GCAP for the distribution of sources of greenhouse gas emissions in Izmir.

17 “Net zero refers to a state in which the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere are balanced by removal out of the atmosphere” (netzeroclimate.org/what-is-net-zero/, accessed 1 January 2023).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zeynep Kadirbeyoglu

Zeynep Kadirbeyoglu (Ph.D. in Political Science, McGill University; MPhil in Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bogazici University (Istanbul). Her research interests include democratization, decentralization, environmental civil society organizations, and citizenship.

Rabia Kutlu

Rabia Kutlu was a Ph.D. student at Bogazici University while this research was conducted. She is currently a Ph.D. student at Stanford University. Her research interests lie in comparative political institutions and political behavior, with a substantive focus on legislative politics, distributive politics, and representation in authoritarian countries. She also studies environmental politics. Her research uses quasi-experimental statistical designs with novel data sources.