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While the building global momentum is calling for decarbonizing energy systems as in the cases of the Green New Deal, the European Green Deal, and more radical transformation options, Turkey’s energy futures hang on a tightrope. As a country once hailed as an economic miracle, Turkey today witnesses a failing economic model based on credit-expansion-driven domestic demand, shattered democratic checks-and-balances as well as booms and busts of construction, extractivism, and energy rush based on clientelist relations. In this chapter, we bring in several knowledge claims from critical biophysical economics and political ecology to situate the undemocratic nature of Turkey’s energy predicament. For doing so, we inquire the socio-metabolic intensification in Turkey across the different sectors making up the economy, with critical attention to how the uneven praxis of power in the last two decades in Turkey has led to deep transformation of socio-natures.

The lack of a thorough understanding of local community's perceptions and considerations, with regard to energy transition, frequently results in the unsuccessful implementation of top-down energy plans and interventions, to which local residents develop strong opposition. The purpose of this study is to gain insights into the way in which the residents of a city district perceive, prioritize and relate to the various aspects of local energy transition. Here we focus on Hoogkerk district of Groningen, located in northern Netherlands, due to the energy transition challenges it faces, but also due to the active role of the recently formulated local citizen initiative. In order to explore diverse viewpoints, a Q methodological study has been conducted in close collaboration with the local citizens energy initiative. Three main viewpoints emerged at the end of our analysis, while insights into a number of overarching consensuses and disagreements were surfaced as well. Indicatively, the protection of social renters in the energy transition policy is prioritized by all the formulated viewpoints. Furthermore, hesitation towards bottom-up processes with regard to the local energy transition, appeared strongly in the results. Finally, the strong ‘village mentality’, that is often attributed to the district of Hoogkerk and expected to play an important role in the local energy transition process, is not perceived as such by the participants. We argue that these insights can support policymakers and the local citizen initiative towards the development of an integrated local energy vision taking into account the diverse viewpoints of Hoogkerk’s citizens.

Migration and climate change are hot topics generating widespread concerns and fears in European public opinion. However, a striking difference between them is the ‘efficacy’ of the fears that surround the two topics. For migration, the spectre of a looming invasion and similar narratives translate into immense impacts and a securitisation of the matter. For climate change, growing awareness over the prospect of a climate emergency only sporadically translates into urgent action. This article engages with this remarkable difference of great political relevance. While analyses of fear and securitisation of migration and climate have privileged inter-state politics and international discourses, here we investigate how fear is produced, mobilised, and contested in sub-national political arenas. Rather than on a spectacular case (as Lampedusa or a Pacific Island) we focus on Sardinia, an ordinary region that, for both climate change and migration, is not under the spotlight – there are no melting glaciers nor climate refugees. Drawing on focus groups and interviews with Sardinian local authorities, we detail how mayors and municipality feel on the frontline against both climate change and migration. However, rather than as security issues, both emerge tangled with questions such as austerity, spopolamento (depopulation), economic decline, and rural-urban dynamics. But while fears over migration translate into strong citizen pressure mayors feel compelled to react to, concerns about climate change instead lead to a sort of fatalism or deferral. We conclude the paper with reflections on the implications that this important difference has for broader debates on climate and migration.

Migration and climate change are hot topics generating widespread concerns and fears in European public opinion. However, a striking difference between them is the ‘efficacy’ of the fears that surround the two topics. For migration, the spectre of a looming invasion and similar narratives translate into immense impacts and a securitisation of the matter. For climate change, growing awareness over the prospect of a climate emergency only sporadically translates into urgent action. This article engages with this remarkable difference of great political relevance. While analyses of fear and securitisation of migration and climate have privileged inter-state politics and international discourses, here we investigate how fear is produced, mobilised, and contested in sub-national political arenas. Rather than on a spectacular case (as Lampedusa or a Pacific Island) we focus on Sardinia, an ordinary region that, for both climate change and migration, is not under the spotlight – there are no melting glaciers nor climate refugees. Drawing on focus groups and interviews with Sardinian local authorities, we detail how mayors and municipality feel on the frontline against both climate change and migration. However, rather than as security issues, both emerge tangled with questions such as austerity, spopolamento(depopulation), economic decline, and rural-urban dynamics. But while fears over migration translate into strong citizen pressure mayors feel compelled to react to, concerns about climate change instead lead to a sort of fatalism or deferral. We conclude the paper with reflections on the implications that this important difference has for broader debates on climate and migration.

Increasingly uncertain climatic patterns, insecure labour conditions, and ever-shifting typologies of human mobility all contribute to the persistence of “cheap food, cheap labour and high profits” logic in the Mediterranean Basin. While changing temporalities and deteriorating environmental conditions reveal complex dynamics in the Mediterranean agro-migration system, the protagonists of this activity, migratory seasonal agricultural workers are often side-lined in political ecology, critical human geography, and development studies. Yet with their precarious labour being indispensable to “save the crops”, their livelihoods are under the direct and indirect impacts of multidimensional environmental and socio-economic changes. This chapter focuses on the case of migrant seasonal workers within labour-intensive agriculture systems in the eastern Mediterranean with a focus on the political economy and legitimising discourses of climate change adaptation policies. Everyday forms of labour resistance practised in migrant labour-intensive agriculture can potentially help just adaptation practices through the labourers’ refusal to accept the terms of their subordination. Thus, drawing on an empirical case from southern Turkey, the findings here suggest the need to go beyond the incremental socio-spatial fixes towards a better understanding of the underlying interests and values in transformative adaptation research.

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