Cem İskender Aydın

Cem İskender Aydın is an ecological economist working on energy and climate policy, environmental justice and mapping environmental conflicts, and environmental governance. He received his BA and MA in economics from Boğaziçi University, Turkey, and his second MA in environmental economics from Toulouse School of Economics, France. He holds a PhD in ecological economics from the University of Paris-Saclay, France. Previously, he worked as a researcher in the EU-funded EJOLT (Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade (2011-15) and ISC-funded ACKnowl-EJ (Academic-Activist Co-Produced Knowledge for Environmental Justice) projects. Aydın is currently a fellow in the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) methodological assessment on the diverse conceptualizations of multiple values of nature and its benefits. He previously worked as the climate policy officer at the Turkish Foundation for Combating Soil Erosion, for Reforestation and Protection of Natural Habitats (TEMA) in Turkey.

Project: “Assessing Multi-level Governance Using Participatory Multi-criteria Evaluation Frameworks: The Case of Windfarm Conflicts in Turkey”

Mobilizations against wind farm projects demonstrate how the “local,” “national,” and “global” are interconnected. These collective movements show how a national action to achieve a global goal—i.e., aiming to prevent the global ecological distribution problem of climate change—may affect local processes and create yet another ecological distribution problem. Hence, investigating the linkages between where decisions are made, actions are taken, or where effects are felt might be useful in understanding the dynamics of ecological conflicts.

This project aims to construct a deliberative multi-criteria framework that can offer a multi-scale assessment procedure capable of presenting complex cross-scale linkages and eliciting the sources of tension between stakeholders at different levels of governance. To this end, this research will assess conflicts around wind farm projects in Western Anatolia. This assessment will be then used to identify and explore the sources of tensions, divergences, and conflicts of interest between stakeholders at the local, regional, and global levels.