Exploring place-based approaches and energy justice: Ecology, social movements, and hydropower in Turkey

Abstract

The topic of energy justice is amassing a fast-growing body of literature uniting crucial questions regarding justice, fairness and equality across our entire energy system. Yet, there still remain opportunities to strengthen the issue's conceptual standing. Momentum has gained in support of integrating the nonhuman world into energy justice frameworks as a possible frontier to expand the conceptual focus of energy decisions and to effectively address the potential environmental degradation they produce. This article takes a closer look at this conceptual expansion and reconsiders energy justice based on the relationship between energy decisions, landscape change and grassroots activism. This point will be explored by applying 'place-based approaches', which focus particularly on technological risks, including energy development projects, and whether or not these risks replace the positive features of a place with negative ones and their subsequent disruptions of the attachments locals feel to the places they reside. Drawing upon three months of fieldwork, interview and group interview data, further discursive analysis of this data, primary documents and a discussion of relevant legal cases, the empirical evidence used in the study is based on Turkey's recent small-scale hydroelectricity power plant (HPP) development policies and how these relate to the planning and construction of approximately 1500 HPPs throughout the country. Such constructions are widely intertwined with social, economic and environmental inequalities such as loss of habitats, deforestation, limitations to access to water, loss of agricultural lands and touristic areas and limitations on recreational activities of locals and public opposition. Accordingly, this article will strengthen the energy justice concept's perception of the nonhuman world by applying place-based approaches to discuss inequalities in energy decisions. Thus, this article will promote an understanding of energy justice, which seeks to strike a balance between human-centric and nonhuman-centric approaches, to identify the issues of justice in energy decisions and address them for attaining fairer energy policies.