Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu is a political scientist with an interest in political ecology, decentralization, local governments, civil society organizations, and citizenship. She worked as a faculty member at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University and was the Faculty Leave Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University during the 2023/24 academic year. She is a member of the interdisciplinary political ecology working group in Turkey and the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice in the UK. She is a country expert (Turkey) for the European University Institute’s Global Citizenship Observatory. She received her PhD from McGill University and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge.  

The Greening of Cities: Transformative Climate Governance or Showcasing Pilot Projects?

Urban areas generate 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. In response, municipalities around the world have implemented urban sustainability initiatives such as 15-minute cities, urban ecological corridors, green community spaces, and the “greening” of urban transportation to mitigate the negative effects of climate change. This project will focus on municipalities’ urban mobility and green space policies to analyze whether the projects that are implemented have the potential to go beyond the pilot phase to generate long-term institutional change within urban areas. Bridging IPC’s focus on urbanization and local governance with its focus on climate change, this research project will comparatively examine cities in Germany and Turkey in order to understand the factors that motivate municipalities to undertake sustainability transition projects. Furthermore, this project aims to bring together municipal actors and civil society organizations from Turkey and Germany to determine which practices engender success and failure. Accordingly, this project seeks to identify policies that can have long-term impacts on mitigating the consequences of climate change and adapting cities.