Description
This paper advances a critical political economy account of climate governance by comparing Turkey’s recently enacted Climate Law with the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal (EGD). While Paris and the EGD already rely on market instruments and technocratic control, Turkey’s law extends these logics. It broadens the scope for commodification and financialization: land, water, forests, carbon sinks, and “ecosystem services” are reframed as assets to be priced, traded, and bundled into financial products.
Rather than treating transition policy as a neutral sequence, we read it through ongoing cycles of enclosure, dispossession, and re-regulation. The law enables new rounds of control via carbon markets, offset schemes, stringent disclosure/reporting mandates, and “transition finance,” shifting decision-making over nature and infrastructure toward large, well-capitalized actors, including multinational firms and cross-border financiers. In practice, agriculture, energy, and construction become testing grounds where environmental functions are converted into revenue streams and balance-sheet items.
These shifts are not distributionally neutral. Costs and risks are likely to be offloaded onto workers, smallholders, tenants, and informal producers—through higher energy and transport bills, compliance burdens pushed down supply chains, and “green” urban renewal that raises rents. Peripheral regions and fiscally constrained municipalities face sharper trade-offs than core industrial districts and large conglomerates. Internationally, Turkey converges with EU models where profitable and diverges where state–business coalitions seek discretionary rents, expanding room for greenwashing.
Overall, the law operates less as a neutral tool of decarbonization than as a transition regime oriented to assetization and accumulation, consolidating elite power and reproducing regional unevenness. We conclude by outlining non-commodifying pathways—public planning, publicly led investment, democratic ownership, and commons-oriented provisioning—for a more just transition.
