Turkey's Green Imagination: The Spatiality of the Low-Carbon Energy Transition within the EU Green Deal.

• Author: Akcali, Emel

Introduction

Analysing energy from a spatial perspective has attracted a great deal of attention in recent decades. Numerous studies have shown the importance of examining the variability of spatial configurations in order to assess the diversity of energy-transition paths. (1) This article draws upon the work of political geography scholars, who view the current green-energy transition as a spatially constituted process "involving the reconfiguration of current patterns and scales of economic and social activity. (2) Focusing on Turkey's low-carbon transition, this article seeks to unpack the heterogenous nature of the renewable energy transition's trajectories within the EU periphery today while problematizing the 'green imagination' of Turkey as an immediate neighbour of and a candidate country for membership in the EU. Thus, this article asks the extent to which the external dimension of the European Green Deal influences the internal energy transition dynamics in Turkey? As Bridge et al. argue, "the fundamentally uneven nature of spatial interactions is both potentially disruptive to policy because they complicate many of its assumptions." The low-carbon transition process can therefore work "as a simultaneous process of geographical equalisation and differentiation that has the potential to produce new patterns of uneven development". (3) A geographical imagination, on the other hand, constitutes new geospatial identities and geographical knowledge that bear on strategies of power. (4) Drawing upon these premises, the article builds on the spatial conditions of multiple, coexisting decarbonization pathways within the EU Green Deal and argues that the low-carbon transition process in Turkey is prone to be shaped by the highly politicized energy market in an authoritarian neoliberal structure on one hand, and Turkey's priorities in energy issues and hard security on the other.

The paper is structured as follows: We will first present the low-carbon transition as a spatial process constituted by political and economic dynamics within any empirical setting. This will be followed by an analysis of the emergence of the spatial pathway that continues to shape Turkey's low-carbon energy transition within the framework of the EU Green Deal and beyond. Such an analysis will reveal the ways in which the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi-AKP) government instrumentalizes renewable-energy investments to create new capital accumulation channels for politically connected businesses in a market-led, low-carbon energy transition. The paper will also show that while Turkey invests in renewable projects as spatial interventions to privatize the gains from the low-carbon energy transition, its near future is simultaneously shaped by the current demands for securing and diversifying its energy supplies. As the low-carbon transition is not implemented in a holistic approach, decarbonization constitutes only one of a variety of strategies shaping Turkey's macro energy policy. This strategy largely prioritizes reducing the energy-import dependency while retaining the country's position as an energy hub. This effort runs parallel to expanding domestic hydrocarbon exploration and production to meet rising consumption needs, much in conformity with the hybrid and neoliberal process of the global energy transition and green imagination. The paper will conclude that in such a globally hybrid and neoliberal greenenergy transition environment, Turkey's energy landscape is not an exception to the global and European trends despite its nuances. Both the EU's Green Deal and Turkey's current green imagination should, however, be enhanced by being more inclusive to the communities who are directly affected by these changes and by democratising the current green-energy transition processes.

The Spatiality of Low-Carbon Transition

Recent debates about green-energy transitions "have tended to focus on the temporal dimensions of transition and to neglect the way in which spatial processes shape energy systems and influence their capacity for transformation." (5) Following Massey, (6) conceiving space as the product of interrelations, as the sphere of multiplicity, and always under construction not only provides an opportunity to critically analyze the multiple (re)configurations of political and economic processes in Turkey's low-carbon transition within the framework of the EU, but also enable us to problematize the current green-energy transition in the world by going beyond the temporal dimensions of the said 'transition.'

Scholars such as the atmospheric chemist and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer recently describe a new geological era called the Anthropocene, which signifies that the Homo Sapiens have made such a significant impact on Earth and its inhabitants and that this has caused a lasting and potentially irreversible effect on its systems, environment, processes and biodiversity. Crutzen and Stoermer have argued furthermore that over the course of a few generations, humans have drained fossil fuels, transformed at least 30-50% of the planet's surface and caused air pollution that exceeds the sum of all natural emissions. (7) As the climate is changing and species are disappearing at an unpreceded rate, a developing field of Anthropocene Geopolitics has now been exploring policies and understandings that aspire for a sustainable world no longer dependent on fossil fuels. (8) More recently, terms and concepts associated especially with environmental studies such as resilience, climate, biodiversity and ecology have also entered the discipline's vocabulary. (9) This new imagining had to be a more-than-human approach to the world (10) going beyond modern conceptions of a humanity separated from nature. As such, together with the influence of complexity thinking, actornetwork theory and critical animal studies, posthumanism has advanced as a new concept within International Relations. It challenges the discipline's human-centred focus (11) and the belief that humans have the right to consume the planet's resources without constraint, solely for their benefit and development.

Both the anthropocene and the posthumanist approaches are rightly criticised for not pointing at the ways in which green-energy transitions are intrinsically bound up with political and economic structures within any given context. (12) Agathangelou and Killian argue for instance that many climate change analysts focus on crises and a call for immediate fixes through market forces. These are often "guided by a combined fantasy of catastrophe and 'forced presentist' macroeconomic models for a future prioritizing a clean fight in the short term rather than a livable planet." (13) Ercandirli claims furthermore that there exist significant problems in the ontological conceptions of both post-humanist and anthropocene approaches because they reduce environmental/ecological issues to agential capacities (agent-centrism or agent-orientism) disregarding the entwined, complex, and socially constructed nature of environmental problems. (14) Solutions to environmental problems therefore should not only focus on the material dialectical relationship between nature and society, but also on the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production within the context of complex relations among states and classes as well as different hegemonic projects of exploitation and rule. (15) As Marxist ecological thinkers rightly argue, the environment as a socio-economic system is not external to the production of knowledge in capitalism; rather it is materially and ideologically internal to capitalist relations of production. (16) Jason W. Moore has even called the Anthrocopene age Capitalocene (17) in order to scrutinize the historical developments and the structures that have led to ecological crises. (18)

Drawing upon such criticism, we argue that in compliance with regional and global trends in green-energy transitions, the guiding principles of Turkey's shift to renewable energy have also been mainly driven by the neoliberal capitalistic logic, business interests, and energy security. This shift also enabled the consolidation of authoritarian politics in Turkey. Such configurations exacerbate rather than respond efficiently to current environmental problems. In her eye-opening work, Spaceship in the Desert, Gokce Gunel (19) offers an excellent example of a green imagination and energy spatiality formed through authoritarian neoliberalism (20) and the potential outcomes. Masdar City has been built, for instance, in the middle of the desert in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to be the first zero-carbon city in the world and a model for other countries. This city has sought, according to Gunel, to make ecological problems 'manageable' in the ways in which business models and design projects will contain and resolve climate change without failing to provide increased productivity and technological complexity. Gunel elaborates further that "the investment in renewable energy and clean technology, which is part of this transition, was expected to shift the emirate's image from oil producer to technology developer, rendering the emirate, as one of my interlocutors put it, "more elite." (21) Despite its ambition, Masdar City has received much criticism both from environmental scholars and activists because it requires at the same time massive amounts of energy, land space, and already scarce water resources to construct and sustain. (22) The $22 billion Masdar project was originally funded from revenues from oil and gas exports as well, raising the ethical question regarding how a city that is funded by money made through selling oil to power industries that are responsible for greenhouse gases and harmful emissions can be considered sustainable. (23) The UAE also tops world rankings on per capita carbon footprints, (24) and within such...