Evren M. Dinçer

Evren M. Dinçer is a sociologist working on labor, industry, and the green transition, with a particular focus on the automotive sector. He received his BA and MA from Boğaziçi University and his PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University, where his dissertation was an ethnography of auto workers in the American Rust Belt. Since 2020, he has been an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Abdullah Gül University in Kayseri and Managing Editor of New Perspectives on Turkey (Cambridge University Press). In 2024–25, he was a Visiting Scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center and the University of Pennsylvania, where he conducted TÜBİTAK-funded research on the labor implications of the electric vehicle transition in the United States. His forthcoming work includes two chapters in the edited volume Labor and the Transition to Electric Vehicles (Bristol University Press), including one examining Turkey’s position in the global EV transition. As a Mercator-IPC Fellow, he will study how Turkish metropolitan municipalities navigate the electrification of public bus fleets and its implications for climate policy and industrial relations between Germany and Turkey. 

Municipal Pathways to Public Transport Electrification: Istanbul, Kayseri, and Turkey’s Electric Bus Future 

Debates on transport decarbonization focus overwhelmingly on private electric cars. Yet electric buses offer the highest-leverage intervention for cities: replacing a single diesel bus offsets the emissions of dozens of cars. These benefits are concentrated among working-class populations who depend on public transit. Unlike cars, buses are procured by municipalities through public tenders, making electrification a policy-determined process rather than a consumer market outcome. Turkey’s thirty metropolitan municipalities collectively form the country’s largest bus-purchasing block, but no framework exists for understanding how they navigate the financing, infrastructure, and geographical challenges of fleet electrification. Meanwhile, price-sensitive tenders increasingly favor Chinese manufacturers, putting pressure on Turkey’s European-integrated bus industry anchored by MAN Türkiye, Mercedes-Benz Türk, and Bozankaya. 

This project develops the first systematic typology of e-bus transition readiness across Turkey’s metropolitan municipalities. It takes Kayseri as a pioneering blueprint: a municipality that paired e-bus fleet expansion with dedicated renewable energy infrastructure now powering 40 percent of its transit journeys. The findings will inform procurement policy, infrastructure planning, and coordination between Germany and Turkey within a rapidly shifting industrial landscape.