NATURE, INFRASTRUCTURE AND AUTHORITARIAN NEOLIBERALISM
Egemen Mercanlioglu
turkey's rush to green energy
What we are attempting here is to meet our energy needs through new, local, renewable energy resources. We are, with the help of entrepreneurial spirit, converting the blessings of God into energy, into production. How could this ever be against the environment? (...) We all benefit from this [in the form of electricity]. [With small hydropower plants] we have been replacing the age-old ‘river flows, Turk just stares’ mentality with ‘river flows, Turk builds’ motto. Nature was entrusted to us, we protect it properly!
– Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan
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The people is those who, refusing to be the population, disrupt the system.
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– Michel Foucault
prologue
Over the past two decades, Turkey’s water-energy nexus has undergone an unprecedented transformation. State-owned large dams have faded into the background and privately-owned and environmentally friendly small hydropower plants (SHPs) have gained currency. This has radically altered Turkey’s hydro-landscape: shifting from old, voluminous rivers of Turkey’s Kurdistan towards the regions marked by high precipitation rates, steep and impassable mountains where young seasonal streams flow with high velocity. To its champions, this new way of converting water into energy was the cornerstone “green” component of Turkey’s “great leap forward” (Gibson and Moore 2011). To its critics, this was yet another case of speculation-driven investments, determined to exploit creeks and streams of uncharted territories to make a buck (Swyngedouw 2005). Indeed, Turkey’s first-ever green energy development has provoked an unprecedented resistance from local communities and urban activists.
Turkey’s rush to green energy maps onto worldwide developments in environmental governance. Pressing concerns over climate change, global warming and other anthropocenic phenomena produce a sense of urgency around energy. It appears that among many human activities that threaten species’ fitness, carbon-dependent production and consumption of energy exert the “deadliest” damage on the biosphere (IPCC 2014). Since at least the early 2000s, states and politicians are called upon to rapidly decarbonize economies by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The latter presses for the formation of a “green economy” where human well-being is sought to be improved through “investing in systems decreasing carbon emissions and pollution, enhancing energy and resource efficiency while increasing revenues and employment” (UNEP 2011). This can be achieved, the programme argues, “by removing economic support mechanisms that are harmful for the environment using regulatory institutions and by embedding green procurement in the public sector to encourage private sector investments in green services and/or products” (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2017).
This formulation is a biopolitical one. Foucault’s biopower signals the consolidation of concepts of life, sexuality, and population as objects and methods of modern governance. The ultimate end of government is “the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, and so on” (Foucault 1990). What Foucault names “governmentality” does not only entail strategies that aim to guarantee and improve “collective human vitality, morbidity, and mortality” but also entails production of “forms of knowledge, regimes of authority, and practices of intervention” (Rabinow and Rose 2006). As human use of energy is increasingly linked to environmental degradation, modalities of biopower increasingly entangle with modalities of what Boyer calls energopower: “the harnessing of electricity and fuel, [enabling] modern life, its ways of knowing and being” (Boyer 2014, 309). This formulation brings together the sciences, politics, and economies of life. Here, life involves issues as far ranging as sexuality, reproduction, care of the self as well as infrastructure, energy and environment.
Here, we are facing a conundrum. On the one hand, the UNEP presents green energy as sine qua non to guarantee human welfare, species’ survival, and to make the biosphere a “fitness landscape” – one which is “both healthy and ‘fitting” (Corner 2004). On the other, what remains obscure is the unsustainability of the political apparatus itself known as neoliberalism. More than a project of “economizing everything” (markets, states, nature, human motivations), the intellectual history of neoliberalism dispels that the latter is a moral-political project “aimed at protecting traditional hierarchies by negating the social as a domain of justice and radically restricting democratic claims on states” (Brown 2020). Rancières (1999) calls this “post-democracy” – “a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount and dispute of the people”. Here, “the politicization of individuals is prevented through the closure of the political” so that neoliberal consensus persists (Swyngedouw 2011).
Especially today, as neoliberalism increasingly assumes an authoritarian and undemocratic outlook, one should interrogate the globalist and totalizing rhetoric that accepts green energy as universally good without paying attention to spatio-temporal differences between different geographies. This rhetoric privileges prescriptive public policies, obscures human difference (Linton 2010) and depoliticizes infrastructure and nature (Swyngedouw 2011) and makes the task of improving human well-being a mission impossible.
Following Star and Ruhleder’s argument (1996) that “infrastructure appears only as a relational property, not as a thing stripped of use”, I will trace Turkey’s burgeoning small hydropower plants as it interacts with a variety of actors, institutions, political discourses and geographical settings. By examining Turkey’s history of energy liberalization, I will situate SHPs at the junction where a global interest in green energy was glued to the national strategy to increase energy supply through private investments. By doing that, I take Turkey’s first-ever green energy development as a lens through which to analyze the political power in twenty-first-century Turkey. I will argue that SHPs have been instrumental to the establishment of an authoritarian neoliberal experience. Yet, this has provoked resistance and counterhegemonic contestation from the Turkish countryside, making the government’s hegemony fragile and unstable.
the global rediscovery of small hydro
Pressing concerns over climate change and depleting fossil fuels have created a sense of crisis around energy. Against this backdrop, water has been rediscovered as a low-carbon energy alternative (Erensü 2015, 61). On paper, each form of hydropower can contribute to carbon mitigation goals. However, owing to a well-organized coalition of grassroots and environmental activists, the late 1990s saw state dams being discredited due to growing concerns over the quality and price of water (Linton 2010). The World Bank, the primary financier of the large dams, was thus forced to reconsider its funding schemes for state dams (Goldman, 2006).
The resentment toward large dams was further underscored by the World Commission on Dams where social, environmental and economic burdens of large dams were deemed “unacceptable and often unnecessary” (WCD 2000). Meanwhile, environmental NGOs started to campaign for the untapped potential of small hydropower plants (SHPs) as “cheap, sustainable, locally designed, financed, and executed solutions that could address growing energy problems” (Rivers International, 2010). Indeed, small hydro has helped local electrification, especially in Asia and Africa, through establishing new local grids to offer cheaper electricity supply for poor communities (Erensü 2016).
Yet, SHPs have fully emerged when the environmental crisis has become increasingly urgent in the early 2000s. In contrast to large dams, they had minute installed capacity and did not rely on reservoirs to produce electricity. Instead, a typical small hydro exploits the vertical distance between two sections of a river by directly capturing the kinetic energy embedded in the velocity of flowing water. Having significantly less social and ecological burdens, SHPs became one of the most significant contributors to the carbon markets (IPCC 2014). Subsequently, the World Bank started to put more emphasis on small hydro (Erensü 2015) and the European Union had recognized SHPs as “environmentally friendly energy conversion options since they do fit in well with the landscape” (The EU Water Framework Directive 2013).
As green energy gained currency, SHP developments have become one of the most well-positioned technologies vis-à-vis multinational renewable energy incentives.
turkey's rush to small-hydro: a genealogy
Baraj, meaning dam in English, was the only word in the Turkish vernacular to indiscriminately refer to a variety of hydraulic technologies. However, the early 2010s has witnessed the penetration of a new term in everyday parlance: HES, the Turkish abbreviation that stands for “hydroelectric powerplant,” used exclusively to refer to small-hydro developments. Though might be seen as trivial, this new addition to the hydro-terminology shows a great deal about Turkey’s “hydropower renaissance” (Erensü 2017).
Indeed, Turkey, a global frontrunner in building large dams, has become one of the most active small hydro building countries in the world (Rivers International 2010). Despite the growing global reputation of small hydro as carbon-free energy infrastructure, Turkey’s interest still is a curious case. Carbon trading is not a motivation for the country as it is only eligible to engage in voluntary markets. Furthermore, unlike many countries in the global South, Turkey’s interest in SHPs is not for rural electrification (Erensü 2016). SHPs are connected to the central grid and thus do not provide off-grid advantages for the local communities. What explains, then, its ubiquity? I locate the discussion at the interplay between Turkey’s scarcity of energy resources and the abundance of global green energy subsidies. Let me explain.
Having negligible hydrocarbon reserves, Turkey has always been considered poor in energy resources. As a net oil importer, the county was significantly hurt by the ensuing oil crisis in the 1970s. Inflated oil prices caused severe hyperinflation, negative growth and a vast foreign exchange crisis (Rodrik 1990). The governing coalition of the time declared a set of measures that initiated the country’s neoliberal “shock therapy” (Klein 2007) which were vehemently opposed by the then strong labour movement. After crushing the left and labour movement, Turkey’s early-neoliberalization was enacted by the military junta under the International Monetary Foundation’s (IMF) supervision. Energy production made up one of the most crucial policy areas (Çetin and OÄŸuz 2007).
The failure of early neoliberalization, due to the lack of willing investors, had significant repercussions. In the 1990s, the country saw ten coalition governments and was struck by major episodes of economic meltdowns. These brought about yet another energy insecurity towards the turn of the millennium. The 2001 economic crisis bankrupted the state’s credibility of efficiently managing energy provision. In desperation, Turkey, again, turned to the IMF for assistance which kick-started the enactment of the Energy Market Law (EML) in 2001. Designed under the supervision of World Bank and Deloitte (Erensü 2015), new law focused on unbundling state monopoly, privatizing public assets and establishing a “financially strong, competitive, efficient and transparent market” (ErdoÄŸdu 2005), overseen by an autonomous body called the Energy Market Regulatory Authority.
Coming to power in 2002, the ErdoÄŸan-led Justice and Development Party (AKP) was not the engineer of the EML. Yet, it became its diligent implementer. In a carefully planned effort, the promotion of electricity production via private investments was combined with the goals for climate change mitigation (Erensü 2015). First, the government enacted the Renewable Energy Law in 2005 whereby it guaranteed to buy all electricity supply produced by private enterprises (IÅŸlar 2012). Then, it signed the UNFCCC and ratified Kyoto, enabling Turkey to be granted with the World Bank’s Clean Technology Fund (ibid.). Numerous other grants have also flowed from multinational organizations and banks (Eberlein and Heeb 2011). After the European Small Hydro Association calculated that Turkey had the second-largest small hydro potential in Europe of which the country had only tapped 3 percent (EHSA 2004), the government started to steer the vast majority of funds to develop small hydro into a vast market (Eberlein and Heeb 2011).
Over the past decade, SHPs have become contemporary Turkey’s most ubiquitous energy infrastructure. The number of licensed SHPs increased from 71 in 2002 to 451 in 2015 (Balat 2007). Meanwhile, private entrepreneurs have spent approximately USD 16 billion for small-hydro developments (ibid) and the country’s installed capacity in hydropower has been doubled. This made Turkey world’s fourth fastest-growing nation in power capacity and energy market expansion in 2014 (ibid) without obliterating carbon mitigation goals determined by Kyoto (Renewable Global Status Report 2015).
"powering" authoritarian neoliberalism
The 2001 economic crisis triggered a sea change for the Turkish political-economy. Moderated from the Islamic fundamentalist tradition, ErdoÄŸan-led AKP established a neoliberal Islamic platform and assumed the office in 2002. It was the crisis of early neoliberalization that produced AKP’s landslide victory. Yet, the party had come to power “not to displace the prevailing neoliberal policy but to implement it better” (Adaman et al. 2017). The promise was to mobilize Turkey’s latent potential by emancipating the private sector from the “bureaucrat-cum-military tutelage” (Aslan 2019). The liberation of the energy sector was an important site for “New Turkey” – dynamic, entrepreneurial, efficient.
Since AKP assumed office, energy has become one of the most attractive sectors. Investments picked up speed upon the completion of supplementary regulations which facilitated the privatization of existing power plants and distribution of new electricity generation licenses at an ever-greater pace. The dynamism of the sector was such that it alone attracted 32 percent of all privatization transactions in 2012 (Erensü 2017). Total investment volume in energy exceeded USD 50 billion between 2008-2015 (ibid). This made the Turkish energy market one of the world’s fastest growing.
If privatization was the bread of Turkey’s burgeoning energy market, small hydro was its butter. The advent of the sector has been considered as one of the catalysts of the post-2001 recovery (Eberliköse 2013). What made the “boom” possible was intimately linked to the global abundance of green energy incentives available to emerging markets like Turkey and the incumbent party’s preferences for how to channel the liquidity. As a result, capital owners of different sizes were blessed with cheap yet short-term loans granted to build SHPs (Erensü 2018).
This, on the one hand, boosted Turkey’s installed capacity in electricity supply which effectively addressed the country’s energy insecurity – providing a fecund ground for the incumbent party to showcase its potency, success and its ability to “serve” its people (Adaman et al. 2017). On the other, owing to the abundance of green energy subsidies, small hydro created a new accumulation opportunity for local shrinking sectors and struggling capital owners in the aftermath of the 2001 financial crisis. Harvey (2005) calls this “accumulation by dispossession”: a spatio-temporal fix aimed at overcoming the inherent contradictions of capitalism through the state-led redistribution of wealth from the public to the private sector. This challenges the enduring tendency in existing literature on neoliberalism that tends to equate the latter exclusively with “the disembedding of the market from state in the name of the mythical invisible hand” (Bruff 2017). Yet, authors like Slobodian (2018), Bruff (2013), and Plehwe and Mirowski (2009) suggest that we ought to acknowledge the ideas that started to circulate in the Mont Pèlerin Society during the-1940s which were “less interested in giving free rein to markets than in engineering and managing the markets that [they] wished to see” (Bruff 2013). It is only through this historical perspective that we can reaffirm “the state’s role and function in (re)producing neoliberalism” (Bruff 2017).
Given the discussion, it is extremely productive to rethink Turkey’s neoliberalization through Bruff and Tansel’s concept of “authoritarian neoliberalism” (Bruff and Tansel 2019). Drawing on Hall (1985) and Poulantzas (1979), authors conceptualize authoritarian statecraft not only through the exercise of brute coercive (police) force but also through the reconfiguring of state and institutional power in order to facilitate certain types of markets. Indeed, glueing worldwide-interest in green energy with neoliberal marketisation trends, ErdoÄŸan-led AKP has facilitated the “activation” of the once-stagnating energy sector by propagating SHPs in the Turkish countryside. However, as Ünüvar and Yeldan (2016) point out, Turkey’s SHP boom was relying on the flow of foreign hot money. Owing to the demand for high and fast returns on foreign capital inflows, investments have been speculative in nature; owing to the short-term, low-interest loans. The sudden inflation of SHPs in valleys was, then, the epitome of the exploitation of creeks and streams by several back-to-back projects (Erensü 2017), rather than achieving “developmental goals” – an age-old rhetoric that AKP often resorts to. The outcome for the Turkish state was the shrinking capacity to generate “hegemonic aura” (Bruff 2013) to absorb the pressures emanating from neoliberal restructurings and garner consent.
This explains the curious case of anti-SHP activism in the countryside where the apparent strengthening of the state was challenged and rendered fragile.
contesting authoritarian neoliberalism: anti-shp uprisings
The phrase quoted in the opening vignette was put across during the “ribbon-cutting” ceremony of one of many small-hydro projects when Turkey’s president ErdoÄŸan was still prime minister in 2010. It has now become a presidential trademark, highlighting unutilized water flow as wasteful and redefining its productive use through building SHPs.
However, the mushrooming of small hydro in the Turkish countryside met with equally widespread resistance. Reasons vary. For one, extensive and unmanaged constructions increased small hydro’s aggregated impact on water, leading to a degradation in its quality and quantity (ÅžekercioÄŸlu et al. 2011). Ironically, the fact that SHPs did not require resettlement of the inhabitants enabled locals to witness small-hydro’s footprint on the rural landscapes (Aslan 2019). Secondly, privatization of water use rights engendered livelihood-related grievances in places where the agricultural production is heavily dependent on water. Moreover, by redefining the productive use of water, privatization meant the rejection of affective relationships enacted by locals to water. This also sheds light on the oft-obscured value of social reproduction (Roberts 2008). Katz defines the latter as “the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life” (Katz 2002). Thirdly, as pointed out by Adaman et al. (2017), privately-owned SHPs never achieved to appeal to “public interest”. Indeed, what developmental goals, if any, small-hydro was expected to accomplish?
Thus, as private energy infrastructures spread across the Turkish countryside, so did the administrative lawsuits filed against them. Trapped between engineering priorities and green energy loan repayments, timely progress was crucial for the project cycle of energy infrastructures. Time and uncertainty, on the other hand, have become strategic tools for grassroots dissidents who could afford waiting. However, to tilt this politics of temporality in favor of the energy infrastructures, AKP resorted to fast track legal mechanisms. One such crucial mechanism was the urgent expropriation – an extraordinary eminent domain procedure with origins in the cold war. This grants the government the authority to bypass the usual legal procedures to confiscate property in anticipation of imminent war, earthquake and energy insecurity. It not only accelerated expropriation processes and inhibited rural residents from appealing but also speeded up the judicial proceedings of permits, actions and licenses prepared for infrastructural projects. By remaking legal frameworks and re-centralizing key decision-making powers, ErdoÄŸan-led AKP acted as skilful land-dealers, guaranteed fast implementation for projects, undermined public participation and the role of critical expertise (Erensü 2018). Bruff names these strategies “preemptive discipline”: “[practices] which simultaneously insulate neoliberal policies through a set of administrative, legal and coercive mechanisms [to] limit the spaces of popular resistance” (Bruff 2013).
One outcome of these aggressive interventions in the rural areas has been the politicization of space. In summer 2010, Turkey’s uncharted valleys and villages made the national headlines due to massive protests against small hydro developments. As legal channels to contest were closed-off to locals, the discontent was translated into physical clashes with contractors. The state, baffled by the “ingratitude” of protesters, not only cast dissidents unpatriotic but also resorted to coercive techniques to discipline dissidents by enforcing police forces. This, in turn, triggered many provincial towns and villages, where people had no prior experience of political activism, to organize demonstration rallies; produced an unprecedented number of grassroots groups popping across the countryside and nurtured the synergy between rural and urban spaces. The uprisings comprised a variety of actors and reflected the multiplicity of living arrangements along the urban-rural spectrum in contemporary Turkey (Öztürk et al. 2013). This spectrum includes seasonal villagers, rural-urban dual-place residents, retirees, urban ecological movements and malcontents. These variegated actors and spaces of resistance popularized environmentalism and produced “terrains of dissensus” (Dikeç 2005) where “a wrong can be addressed, equality can be demonstrated” (Rancière 1999). These were spaces where the “naturalized” order of domination was interrupted by those “who had no part in that order” (ibid.). Establishing coalitions in villages, towns and metropolises, rural movements were delocalized and shaped the rural and the urban oppositional landscapes. This was best exemplified by the Gezi Park Uprisings in summer 2013.
Since Gezi, Turkey has been interpelled by an unceasing state of turmoil. The country went through corruption scandals, a failed coup attempt, still-lingering state of emergency and the abolishment of its 100-year-old parliamentary system for what pundits call a repressive presidential system. Over the past decade, the words of Gramsci ring true (Fraser 2019): “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (Gramsci 1971). Today, if progressive oppositional politics has a fighting chance, they owe this to SHPs and the rural opposition it provoked who started the political fire.
conclusion
I started my discussion with Boyer’s (2019) argument that conditions of life have become more and more linked with particular energy infrastructures as climate change threatens species’ survival. I pointed out the United Nations Environment Programme’s emphasis on what it dubbed green economy and its biopolitical implications. Deeming green energy a prerequisite, such policies, I argued, posit globalist rhetorics, restricting democratic claims on states and obscuring the social and human difference. My central argument was centralized on the politicization of nature, infrastructure and space through which the global, social and body could be reconciled.
My interest in small hydropower plants took its inspiration from Star who argued that what is studied through an inquiry into infrastructures is not a thing, but a relationship (Star 1999, 379). Therefore, my emphasis on small-hydro took its cue from a curious question that dispels the taken-for-grantedness of green energy: what was that made SHPs so central to both Turkey’s recent energy drive and its counter environmental mobilization?
Having been the central pillar of Turkey’s “hydropower renaissance” (Erensü 2017), I located small hydro around the intersection where a world-wide interest in green energy met Turkey’s energy security or lack thereof. Despite its various reputations as renewable, green, low-impact, local-friendly, I argued that the small-hydro boom was first and foremost key to the country’s energy liberalization efforts. As landscape forming infrastructures, SHPs were instrumental in the spread of neoliberalism across a vast territory by restructuring entanglements between state, society, market and nature.
Part of my intention in this paper was, therefore, making sense of Turkey’s neoliberalization. Scarcity of energy, due to the oil crisis in the 1970s, eroded the promise of the planned economy, legitimizing the arrival of a liberal market economy – albeit under a military junta. With AKP assuming office in 2002, neoliberalization found a fecund ground; the liberalized energy mitigated Turkey’s energy scarcity and created a lucrative market for capital owners by propagating SHPs. Yet, it also provoked an unprecedented resistance from local communities and urban activists. Examining how the government disciplined resentful citizens in the name of the market, I shed light not only on the centrality of SHPs within Turkey’s authoritarian neoliberal experience but also on the formation of counter hegemonic movements, seeping through the cracks on the government’s hegemony.
My intention was by no means to depict Turkey’s grassroots environmental mobilizations as a project that is complete and successful. To the contrary, despite victories in certain fronts, the mobilizations were far from putting a dent in Turkey’s authoritarian statecraft. However, I suggest the organizational reach of these mobilizations across the spatial, cultural and class lines and the alternative imaginaries they stipulated points to alternative trajectories that could challenge the current globalist rhetoric that demonizes the social and undermines democracy and neoliberal authoritarian hegemony in the long run. This points to an alternative and a more potent way of linking global problems with the body.
Below is a mapping exercise aiming at two objectives: (1) to reveal close-knitted relations between multinational organizations, state and capital; (2) tracing actors of the anti-small hydro mobilizations and the networks through which this agitation had transformed into activism.
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The story that it puts across is that of the Eastern Black Sea Region (EBSR) – the small hydro capital of the country. Located in the northeastern edge of Turkey, the region is shaped by Pontic Mountains and marked by high precipitation rates – nourishing not only tea and hazelnut cultivation but also hundreds of fast-running streams at which energy entrepreneurs gaze. Following the retrenchment of agricultural subsidies in the 1980s, the population in the region dwindled. Yet, it has led to establishing the biggest domestic diaspora in metropolitan regions. With the improvements in transportation technologies, a unique form of villager has emerged who has both rural and urban residency.
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This sheds light on the variegated, multi-actor landscape of the anti-small hydro activism field which includes seasonal villagers, rural-urban dual-place residents, retirees, urban ecological movements and malcontents. Establishing coalitions in villages, towns and metropolises, rural movements in the EBSR were delocalized and shaped the rural and the urban oppositional landscapes; best exemplified in Gezi Park Uprisings.
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The interface is powered by "graph commons": a network mapping tool invented right after the Gezi Park Uprisings in 2013 as a progressive reaction to the freedom of information or lack thereof. The premise was to reveal the so-called "actors of dispossession" involved in the heavily contested extractive projects.
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In what follows, you may find out how had the field of small hydro came into being; when locals were agitated and at what point their agitation was translated into uprisings.
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