Environmental conflicts emerge across scales in configurations transcending temporal and spatial boundaries in search of new materials and energy sources to fuel growth-dependent economies. Increased visibility and politicization of socio-environmental debates today also place the focus on the winners and losers in these conflicts. Türkiye, with its expanding societal metabolism in its centennial, is a hotbed of contestation for such conflicts at the periphery of Europe. Despite existing tensions about the rollout of developmentalism much earlier, the two decades under Erdoğan’s authoritarian rule led to the emergence and transformation of place-based environmental movements against state-facilitated energy boom and mining rush. While the environmental movements in Türkiye spent much of this period opposing hydropower, mines, and breakneck-speed urban transformation, today there appears to be an increased frequency of ecological conflicts across the country in a time when the legal checks and balances on its non-human environment are being upheld more than ever. Then for the scholars of environmental movements, the question becomes: What does it mean to win? In an attempt to reflect on this question, our aim here is to examine the changing nature of environmental conflicts in parallel with the transforming political landscape of Turkey. We argue that the recent rise in both fossil fuel and renewable infrastructure conflicts were all but unexpected. In a time when oppositional politics is largely constrained, our findings also hint at the emergence of antagonistic and intersectional environmental politics as an avenue of manifesting broader societal dissent.

Political ecology critically examines environmental issues, recognising that they are deeply intertwined with social, economic, and political factors, as products of power dynamics and historical processes. In recent years, political ecology has been increasingly criticised for reproducing colonial approaches and prioritising Western-centered forms of knowledge production. Decolonising political ecology requires incorporating decolonial research methods into environmental and social science studies and adopting marginalised epistemologies, such as those grounded in feminism, decolonial, and Indigenous theories. Implementing this perspective in the field means, for example, involving local people in the research process not merely as participants, but as co-researchers. While this is ethically important for a more equitable knowledge co-production, it is not devoid of difficulties. In this light, drawing on our research on environmental conflicts in Latin America, particularly in Ecuador and Colombia, approached from a political ecology perspective, we present our attempts to construct non-extractivist research practices, highlighting both the positive outcomes and the challenges faced, expected and unexpected. In particular, the research in Ecuador was conducted in an oil context of the Amazon region, to explore the perceptions of an Indigenous population, regarding the impacts of extractive activities. Involving the local people in the study allowed to co-define the research objectives and methods, but also exposed the researchers to the pressures from the various actors involved, especially the oil company, Eni. Conversely, the fieldwork conducted in the Colombian Amazon focused on the social impact of a carbon forestry project involving a semi-nomad community living in a guerrilla-controlled territory. In this case, the attempt to co-define research objectives proved harder than expected due both to practical reasons and to the epistemological distance between researcher and research partners, as well as due to the risks (both real and perceived) involved. Based on our experience, a decolonial approach to field research requires a set of heuristic methodological tools through which we, as researchers, can critically reflect on our positionality, constantly renegotiate our identity and where necessary redefine research goals and practices in order to avoid (if at all possible) perpetuating colonial practices.

Over the last decade, the Central Asian region has been threatened by the effects of climate change and related socio-environmental challenges in terms of natural resources governance, land access as well as local communities’ everyday life. These processes, that increased social marginalization and vulnerability, are inherently political since they include institutional and social actors, their visions and interests, and are shaped by complex decision-making processes and power relations. However, governments in the region have tempted to minimize this political nature and hampered community mobilizations. Political ecology has emphasized these issues by highlighting the need to shed light on the socio-political dimension of environmental change, and especially embedded power and conflicting relations, and to repoliticize these processes. Indeed, political ecology is seeking to go beyond contemporary global capitalist development towards post-capitalist, radical democratic and degrowth futures. However, little attention so far has been paid by political ecology scholars to the Central Asian region, probably due to its diverse authoritarian socio-political regimes and limited spaces for grassroots political claims and engagement. Therefore, this paper aims to reflect on the adoption of political ecology’ theoretical and methodological lenses to Central Asia through the analysis of a transforming heritage-scape and related community engagement in Uzbekistan. The Kafir Kala heritage-scape, located in the outskirts of Samarkand, includes an important archaeological site, recenly inscribed in UNESCO world heritage list, together with a vast community pastureland. Since 2022, an international research project, Kalam, has been designing an open-air archaeological park, the first example in the country. Through community-based ethnographic methods, research highlights the complex socio-spatial and environmental dimension of the heritage-scape transformation process, analyzes diverse visions and interests of institutions and communities and unveils political and uneven power relations in the project’ decision-making processes. Indeed, through the analysis of research’ methodological and empirical challenges, this paper provides a space to advance the reflection on the “challenging” adoption of a political ecology approach to research in “authoritarian” states and on knowledge and its decolonization.

In what spaces does cosmopolitanism take place? This communication is situated within the framework of political ecology and decolonial thought (Torre 2024) and discusses cosmopolitanism in a time that has been defined as «capitalocene» (Moore 2017). Capitalocene is used as a concept of «terra-forming» describing the profound ecological transformations of the planet Earth driven by the historical and geographical dynamics of colonialism and capitalism. The spaces of cosmopolitanism have been intertwined with the spaces of capital, the latter meant as both a social relation and a socio-ecological system. This discussion argues that to recover cosmopolitanism and its purposes of planetary peaceful and sustainable conviviality, rather than adhering to the abstract notion of the «citizen of the world», a more viable alternative available to us is to explore decolonial options towards ecological cosmopolitanism. Ecological cosmopolitanism includes conceptions of the pluriverse (Kothari et al. 2019; Minoia 2024) and their transformative understandings of community, of the relations between space and time and between nature and humankind. Capitalism and ecological cosmopolitanism cannot go hand in hand, as they are two socio-ecological systems at odds with each other. Whereas capitalism is based on people and resources exploitation, ecological colonialism and imperialism, ecological cosmopolitanism offers an alternative to engage with the cosmos at large, emphasizing the interconnections between human and other-than-human living beings, where there is no dominance of time over space and where there is not a prevailing human over nature. In ecological cosmopolitanism, space and time, humans and nature, exist in a condition of consubstantiality and mutual interdependence.

Kothari A., Salleh H., Escobar A., Demaria F., Acosta A. (2019). Pluriverse. A Post-Development Dictionary. New Delhi: Tulika Books.

Minoia P. (2024). Post-sviluppo: critiche postcoloniali e alternative decoloniali. In: Bignante E., Bini V., Giunta I. e Minoia P. (eds). Geografie critiche della cooperazione internazionale. Milano: UTET, pp. 45-59.

Moore J.W. (2017). The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis’. Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(3), pp. 594-630.

Torre S. (2024). Il pensiero decoloniale. Milano: UTET.