The limits of authoritarian energy governance: Energy, democracy and public contestation in Turkey

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.