Diffusion of global climate policy: National depoliticization, local repoliticization in Turkey

Although climate policy diffusion is widely studied, we know comparatively little about how these global policies and the norms that surround them are used by various political actors seeking to advance their own agendas. In this article, we focus on how global climate norms are diffused differently at national and local scales and used to repoliticize or depoliticize climate change. We focus on the case of Turkey, which carries the stark contrast of showing willingness to achieve global climate goals in the international arena but less so in domestic politics and actions. The article employs a novel methodological approach, using topic modeling and network analyses on a range of climate change–related policy documents, and interviews with high-level officers, conducted at the three jurisdictional levels in Turkey. The findings reveal that although global climate policy is diffused to both national and local governments, it is used in different ways at these levels. The national government uses climate policy diffusion to depoliticize climate change by creating ad hoc climate coalitions and limiting local climate actions to seeking external climate-related funds. Meanwhile, the metropolitan municipalities replicate nationally adopted climate goals, whereas the district municipalities domesticate ambitious climate norms and repoliticize climate change via local climate entrepreneurs and civic action. The paper contributes to understanding how climate policy diffusion and norm domestication can have different political outcomes in achieving global climate goals and argues for increased policy attention to the strategic use of climate policy diffusion for the depoliticization of climate change.publishedVersio

Turkish media wildfire coverage during the summer of 2021

In this article, some of the assumptions commonly put forward in media research about wildfires and disasters will be examined by exploring how the 2021 fires in Turkey were framed in newspapers with differing editorial and political views. Within the scope of this reporting, the discussion will centre on how these reports of fires, omitted any mention of climate change and its impact on these disasters. Media organizations evaluate disasters through the lens of their geographical and national positions as well as power relations, without associating them with global events such as climate change. The media in Turkey covered the fires within the framework of their current political and social conflicts. This situation has seen newspapers deliver news focused on extinguishing fires, post-disaster response discussions and \"last minute\" developments, instead of offering solutions on climate change and the implementation of mitigation or adaptation policies. In this research, through the use of frame analysis method, the approaches and the actors that newspapers represented while covering wildfires are analyzed. In the next phase, news frames are studied whether they are oriented to reveal the causes of the wildfires (diagnostic) or to propose solutions (prognostic) regarding firefighting or climate adaptation policies. The publication which provides most solutions, referred to solutions in 14,2% of all its news. Regardless of their political views all newspapers in the sample generally proposed solutions regarding the recovery process rather than proactive or preventative climate adaptation policies.Bu makalede yangınlar ve afetlerle ilgili medya araştırmalarında yaygın olarak ileri sürülen bazı varsayımlar, Türkiye’deki 2021 yangınlarının farklı siyasi görüşten gazetelerde nasıl çerçevelendiği incelenerek sınanacaktır. Bu çerçevede ele alınacak en temel varsayım yangın gibi afetler haberleştirilirken, iklim değişikliğinin bu afetleri şiddetlendiren etkisinden bahsedilmemesidir. Medya kuruluşları, afetleri iklim değişikliği gibi küresel olaylarla ilişkilendirmeden kendi coğrafi ve ulusal konumlarının ve güç ilişkilerinin merceğinden değerlendirirler. Türkiye’de medya, mevcut siyasal ve toplumsal çatışmalarının çerçevesinden yangınları haberleştirmiştir. Bu durum da iklim değişikliği konusunda önlemler almaya, azaltım ya da uyum politikaları yürürlüğe koymaya yönelik çözüm önerileri sunmak yerine gazeteleri daha çok yangın söndürme, afet sonrası müdahale tartışmaları ile ‘son dakika’ gelişmeleri odaklı haberler yapmaya itmiştir. Araştırmada çerçeve analizi yöntemi kullanarak gazetelerin yangın haberlerini verirken hangi çerçeveleri ve siyasal toplumsal aktörleri ön plana çıkardıkları incelenmiştir. Sonraki aşamada, haberlerin çerçevelerinin yangınların nedenini teşhis etmeye (diagnostic) ya da yangınla mücadele ve iklim değişikliğine uyum politikalarına dair çözüm üretmeye (prognostic) odaklı olup olmadıkları değerlendirilmiştir. En yüksek oranda çözüm üreten yayın haberlerinin %14,2’sinde çözüm önerilerine yer vermiştir. Siyasi görüşlerinden bağımsız olarak örneklemdeki bütün gazeteler genellikle toparlanma/iyileşme sürecine dair çözümler önermişlerdir, proactive -önleyici- iklim uyum politikaları önerileri içermemektir

Turkish Media Wildfire Coverage during the 2021 summe

During the summer of 2021, wildfires emerged in several countries across the world.Although there have been obvious similarities in causes of fires, such as droughts due toclimate change, media outlets constructed narratives within their own national contexts andtheir relationships to global power structure. This framing, defined as the geopolitics ofdisaster coverage by scholars (Pantti, & Wahl-Jorgensen & Cottle 2012), promotes the use ofbanal nationalism in the language of journalism and a figure of citizen that reinforces nationstate as a locus of action rather than underlining the impact of climate change.This study claims that journalists who stuck in the national context and who didn’t refer towildfires in other countries became disconnected from the global context and thus from thegovernance of a globalized risk (Volkmer & Sharif 2018) intensified by the climate change.The sample of the study is constructed by scanning the word \"fire\" in three Turkishnewspapers: one pro-incumbent party (AKP), one pro-main opposition (CHP), and a very firstdigital journalism platform in Turkey, an independent news website, respectively Sabah, Sözcü, Bianet. It consists of 75 news picked up almost evenly from each newspaperbetween 28 July-September 1 st that covers the era starting with the first fire of the summerin Manavgat, Antalya and ending with the extinction of the fire in Dersim. This period coversalso the firefighting process in other countries such as Italy, Russia, Greece, etc. Therefore,the study aims to identify prominent framings (De Vreese, 2016) of these newspapers byanalysing how they qualify the causes of the fires: \"sabotage\", \"unintentionally caused byhumans\" \"pure impact of drought\" and \"caused by humans and intensified by the impact ofclimate change\" and as such. It seeks to question whether journalists refer to the causes ofother fires in the world. The study also analyses the debate on the preventive measures:what kind of solutions are proposed -if there are any- by journalists? Are the fires aretreated like local disasters that need local solutions or something that is also part of a globalthreat, such as climate change, and thus need both global and local adaptation andresilience policies?The study aims to underline that journalists have to overcome the national political contextas well as the use of banal nationalism in order to accomplish the requirements of a globalrisk journalism. It intends also to emphasize the significance of the journalistic interest onthe governance of the disasters intensified by the climate change

Columnist generations of Turkey and mediatic construction of leader charism in the light of Gezi movement

Cette thèse étudie les générations politiques des chroniqueurs, membres de l’élite journalistique sous le gouvernement de l’AKP, tâchant de définir les rôles qu’ils tiennent et les discours qu’ils produisent lors des crises politiques, dans notre cas celle qui est suscitée par le mouvement de Gezi. En s’appuyant sur la sociologie des crises politiques de Michel Dobry et étudiant le champ journalistique, les trajectoires militantes et professionnelles des chroniqueurs, ce travail avance l’hypothèse principale selon laquelle le rôle d’intermédiaire/médiateur politique est celui dont s’approprient ces derniers lors des crises politiques. La construction médiatique du charisme d’un leader, Erdoğan en l’occurrence, par les chroniqueurs au travers du mouvement de Gezi fait également l’objet de notre rechercheThis thesis examines the political generations of the columnists as members of the journalistic power elite under the AKP government, and endeavour to reveal the roles they hold; the discourses they produce during political crises, in our case that which is aroused by the Gezi movement. Relying on the sociology of political crises of Michel Dobry while examining the journalistic field; the militant and professional trajectories of the columnists, this study posits as main hypothesis that the columnists appropriate the role of political mediators during political crises. The media construction of a leader’s charisma that of Erdoğan, by the columnists through the Gezi movement is the subject of our study as wel