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

The green divide and heat exposure: urban transformation projects in istanbul

Extreme heat events are happening more frequently and with greater severity, causing significant negative consequences, especially for vulnerable urban populations around the globe. Heat stress is even more common in cities with dense and irregular planning and lacking urban blue-green infrastructures. This study investigates the greening and cooling effects of five selected urban transformation projects and their surrounding areas (within a 10-min walking distance) in Istanbul from 2013 to 2021, with a focus on environmental justice and climate adaptation planning perspectives. By employing temporal analysis of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Land Surface Temperature (LST) values derived from Landsat data sets to detect changes in these five selected urban transformation projects in the megacity of Türkiye, Istanbul, this study finds that the distribution of green infrastructures (e.g., tree canopy) is only limited to project sites of long-running and state-supported urban transformation projects in Istanbul. Consequently, the unequal distribution of green infrastructures creates cooling effects only for the locals residing in the new residential projects. However, the surrounding areas have less urban green infrastructure and are exposed more to the urban heat over time. Urban development policies and planning highly contribute to increasing the climate vulnerabilities among those who do not benefit from the recently developed residential units in Istanbul. Such a trend can affect adaptive capacity of vulnerable communities and redress environmental injustices in urban planning in the megacity of Istanbul