Development as in-justice: An Evaluation of Justice and Development Party’s development strategies

7/20/15, 10:40 PMDevelopment as in-justice: An Evaluation of Justice and Development Party’s development strategies | Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Türkei

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Development as in-justice: An Evaluation ofJustice and Development Party’s developmentstrategies14. Jul. 2015 von

The construction business, which proved to be one of the principal sectors of AKP period developmentstrategy, has not only hit the rural areas but also historical and central neighborhoods of metropolitan cities.One of the gentrification attempts which paved the way for rant for the construction business, displacedpeople and demolished the social fabric through social engineering, is the “Tarlabaşı 360” project, which wasaccomplished by the Beyoğlu Municipality despite all opposition.. Foto: . Dieses Bild steht unter einer .

Bengi Akbulut

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The 10th development plan (2014-2018), devised and approved by the formerJustice and Democracy Party (AKP) government in June 2013, states the goal ofdevelopment as the creation of a social environment that enables individuals tolead a free, healthy, and safe life, and ensures the happiness, prosperity anddignity of citizens (State Planning Organization, 2013). It also posits thatparticipation, inclusion, transparency and accountability should be the foundingprinciples of the development process.

Yet, judging by the one-large-construction-site look of the country’s landscape afterits 13-year rule, it seems that the AKP’s vision of development was hardly anythingother than erecting cement structures; skyscrapers, shopping malls, cannals,bridges, etc. While this may not be too inaccurate a description, as constructionwas indeed dubbed the engine of development, it is worth looking more closely atthe understanding of development that the AKP has embraced and the policiesthrough which this understanding was articulated.

Development comes with its discontents, from communities whose living spacesare destroyed by energy projects to those bearing the detrimental health impacts ofindustrial pollution, from residents of entire villages submerged under water withdam constructions to miners killed by the hundreds. Discursively, development hasalways served as a powerful notion that has shaped the social and political spherein Turkey. Catching up with the “West” and attaining the level of Westerncivilizations has not only been the long-lasting objective of policy-making, but alsodominated the social imaginary like no other (Akbulut and Adaman, 2013). Againstthis backdrop, it is not surprising that the AKP’s logic of development was in manyways a continuation of the idea of catching-up that marks the history of the Turkishstate. On the other hand, the AKP’s development policy was also a continuation ofthe neoliberal wave that became dominant after early 1980s, albeit with itsparticularities.

Despite the lip service paid in the national development plans, the idea ofdevelopment realized during the AKP era can hardly be called a people-centeredprocess that has prioritized human dignity, health, happiness, and democracy. Thequestion of development was posed primarily about ensuring economic growth,



which was assumed to be a rising tide that lifts all boats, i.e., the benefits accruingfrom growth were implicitly assumed to lead to higher living standards across thesociety. In this way, development was rendered an automatic ex-post of economicgrowth, its natural sidekick, and the distributive conflicts as well as the socio-ecological costs of growth policies were swept under the rug.

Development as dislocation, dispossession, and disruption

This approach translated into an immediate and full-fledged liberalization movewithin the context of rural development. As will be recalled, the wake of the AKPrule in 2002 coincided with the rolling-out of the World Bank-backed AgriculturalReform Implementation Project (ARIP) and adaptation with the CommonAgricultural Programme (CAP) as a part of the EU-accession process. While theseeds of both ARIP and CAP were planted before AKP’s came to power, theprivileging of market mechanisms in organizing the socio-economic sphere and thelogic of market-based developmentalism that underlie them can be said to havedefined AKP’s subsequent general approach to rural development. Accordingly, themain impediment to rural development was identified as the overall inefficiency ofagriculture caused by state subsidies and the existence of a (largely unproductive)surplus population in agriculture. The rural development objective was thus set asrendering the agricultural sector competitive on a global scale by correcting pastmarket distortions (i.e. over-production) and the reduction of the share of laborforce in agriculture to levels on par with the sector’s contribution to the GrossDomestic Product (GDP) (State Planning Organization, 2006). The implied logic wasthat the agricultural sector would eventually gain competitiveness in internationaltrade through efficiency-enhancing measures and the resulting benefits would bebroadly shared. The surplus population that would be released from agriculture, onthe other hand, was expected to be absorbed into employment in the urban centers.

Among the many drastic changes that this vision of rural development implied, themost notable has perhaps been a radical restructuring of the state’s involvement inthe agricultural sector. During the AKP era, former instruments of state support inagriculture, most significantly direct output purchases and input subsidies, werelargely eliminated and replaced by a direct-income support scheme. Direct-incomesupports were favored as they are de-coupled from production decisions and thus



supports were favored as they are de-coupled from production decisions and thushave no impact on quantities produced by farmers, unlike input and outputsubsidies which distort market prices, give “wrong” signals to producers and thuslead to inefficiencies stemming from over-supply of subsidized crops. This strategyto eliminate overproduction inefficiencies went hand-in-hand with interventions toscale up agricultural production to realize productivity gains; that is to say, large-scale production facilities were actively supported on grounds that small-scalefarming is inefficient as it fails to reap benefits of scale economies in inputs.

This policy outlook translated most visibly into the infamous laws that eradicatedsubsidies for crops like tobacco, sugar beet and hazelnut. The removal of subsidieswere coupled with state support to encourage the cultivation of alternative crops forwhich the sector supposedly held comparative advantage in international trade.Given that shifting across crops is often costly (in terms of inputs and time) and thatmarketing networks for the new crops were largely absent, the alternatives towhich the farmers were directed have generally failed to compensate for the lossesfrom the removal of state subsidies. The resulting decline in the viability of rurallivelihoods has triggered a massive process of rural dispossession (exacerbated byrural enclosures described below) and the interlinked displacement of largesections of rural population from farming, in addition to alarming levels of ruralindebtedness. Thus, the resulting rapid rural-urban migration forced the surplusrural population into urban centers as cheap available labor, often to be employedin informal jobs with precarious conditions, such as construction and mining.

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As their population gets more crowded, the housing problem in metropolitan centers becomes even worse.The Dikmen Valley in Ankara both whets the appetite of TOKI and its constituents and witnesses theresistance of those who grew up here. The monthly rent for the no-water, no-road houses of the valley, whichserves as the final refuge for migrants from within Turkey and abroad, can be as high as 250 TL.. Foto:

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On the other hand, labor forms in agricultural production have also transformed, asdemonstrated with the rise of contract-farming as the new model of agriculturalproduction and the emerging prevalence of industry-type large scale productionfacilities (Ulukan, 2013). For many producers who were forced to shift away fromthe crops they traditionally cultivated and failed to substitute or otherwise hit bymarket dynamics that now govern the sector (including indebtedness), contract-farming provided a somewhat desirable option as it lowered the risks involved inproduction. It also meant, however, the loss of all decision-making power in theproduction process for the producers (leading some to call contract- farmers “ruralproletariat on their own fields”) and often facing lower prices at the end than agreedupon, let alone the problematic implications of contract farming for environmentalsustainability.1

To recap, rural development in the AKP era translated into increasingcommercialization, the extension of markets and the erosion of small-farmers’base of reproducing their existence. Unable to compete with large producers andoften lacking access to independent marketing networks (thus losing most of theadded value they gave to middlemen), many small farmers were and continue to bepushed into further dispossession and indebtedness. In addition, the interlinkedprocesses of dispossession, rural indebtedness and proletarianization, coupledwith the unpredictability of markets, forced many farmers to give up subsistencefarming and thus they had to rely on markets to meet livelihood needs. Given theprice fluctuations and asymmetric power dynamics that they face, reliance on themarkets implies increased vulnerability and loss of any buffer for small farmers.

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markets implies increased vulnerability and loss of any buffer for small farmers.

On the side of industrial development, the AKP strategy rested on a combination ofavailability of cheap credit and of cheap labor (not least due to the rural-urbanmigration triggered with the restructuring of agricultural sector), on the one hand,and a furthering the internationalization of domestic capital, on the other. In manyrespects, this was a continuation and deepening of the export-orienteddevelopment path that the country was set upon since the early 1980’s. Within thiscontext, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME’s) became the centerpiece ofindustrial development, with AKP’s declared commitment to promote theirinterests (Hoşgör, 2011). Grounded in a vision of development as achieving globalcompetitiveness primarily through their flexible production abilities, SME’s weresupported by the provision of credit subsidies, tax incentives and the reorganizationof the labor market to allow flexible forms of employment, in addition to explicitefforts to strengthen their access to international markets. An accompanying twistwas the regional emphasis introduced with the Regional Development Agencies,envisaged as governance institutions to mobilize local dynamics to increase localcompetitiveness, and to attract and organize investment (Gündoğdu, 2009). Theregional approach to development management was advocated to be theinstitutional response to what the dynamicism of SME’s and the particular needsand strengths found in different regions required (Ataay, 2005).

In practice, however, SME’s have largely failed to realize the great hopes pinnedupon them. Far from fulfilling the role of technological innovators and drivers ofefficiency, they generally remain confined to labor-intensive low-technologyproduction, gaining competitiveness primarily through low labor-costs. Theregional developmental approach, on the other hand, becomes a tool ofsuppressing and de-legitimizing labor demands; while the discourse of regionaldevelopment as attracting capital pits sub-national regions against each other,labor is repressed with the threat of capital flight to other regions.

It was perhaps the ascent of energy and construction as the country’sdevelopmental engines that became the hallmark of AKP era. Both sectors aremarked with the explicit and visible role that the state assumed in theirrestructuring as venues of capital accumulation. That is to say, a series of critical



changes in the legal infrastructure was completed in this period to facilitateinvestment in these sectors and enabled their boom. In the case of energy, therestructuring and liberalization of energy markets to open fields of energyinvestments previously beyond reach to the private sector—most notably coal andhydropower—were consolidated by AKP. This was buttressed by the consistentrelaxation of environmental legislation that could potentially halt the developmentof the sector and the provision of a variety of incentives, including forms of marketassurance and credit subsidies. In the case of construction, numerous legalrevisions were made to allow state expropriation of land for purposes ofredevelopment and marketing and to unlatch lands previously under protection intoconstruction investments. Within this context, the Housing DevelopmentAdministration emerged as the critical instrument which mediated the state-leddevelopment of the sector and private capital investments. The institution wasendowed with powers to develop profit-oriented housing projects in collaborationwith municipalities and private companies, and establish enterprises directly orjointly with the private sector. In addition to the housing boom, infrastructureinvestments took place on massive scales—such as the Northern Anatolia Highwayand the Izmit Bay Bridge, as well as the planned third bridge to span the Bosphorusand a third airport in the Northeast of Istanbul.

If the visibility of the state’s role is the first common thread to the rise ofconstruction and energy, the appropriation of space inherent to them is the second.The most evident implication of this developmental strategy had been the enclosureand/or destruction of rural-urban commons and living spaces, displacement ofcommunities as well as the erosion of their means of livelihood, modes of living andthe networks that sustain them. While this was manifested as an acceleratedprocess of rural-urban migration already set off by the agricultural policies in therural context (as well as spurring wide-spread social resistance), it meant therestructuring of urban space so that working class populations are relegated tooutskirts while city centers are turned into commercialized spaces marketed indifferent ways to tourists, consumers and real-estate investors.

Put in a broader context, the developmental strategy of the AKP rested onmobilizing labor, resources (e.g. minerals) and energy by a regime of enclosure and



dislocation from the rural areas to urban centers. The restructuring of theagricultural sector, coupled with energy and infrastructure investments thatradically changed the rural landscape, dislocated large sections of the population tourban centers, where they were mostly incorporated into the pool of cheap labor(Adaman et al, 2014). On the other hand, large-scale infrastructural investments tosustain this mobilization together with massive urban transformation andgentrification projects kept the construction sector alive.

Justifying it through Turkey’s supposed energy need and aspiring even the smallest watercourse, AKP hasgiven more than 2000 licenses to hydroelectric power plant projects. One of the main victims of the privatesector’s greed which manifests itself in the ‘massacre on nature’ has been the coastal city Artvin wherehundreds of thousands of trees have been cut down already.. Foto: . Dieses Bild steht unter einer .

Development—Which way now?

All in all, the AKP has operationalized a market-based, neoliberal developmentalistagenda that has envisioned economic growth to be brought by structural changewith active state involvement (much like old-school developmental models), butthrough the use of market dynamics: constructing, shaping and participating in

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through the use of market dynamics: constructing, shaping and participating inmarkets to achieve economic growth by a particular division of labor and spacewithin the country. This model has managed to reproduce consent to a certainextent through the populist, albeit limited, distribution of growth benefits, primarilythrough social policies. Perhaps more importantly, the strength of the notion ofeconomic development as a societal goal, whose appeal is almost neverquestioned, served to justify the AKP’s developmental model in the face of itsdrastic social and ecological costs. The close association of construction withmodernization in the social imagination and the discourse on the country’s energydeficit as the main obstacle to development are telling in this respect.

More generally, the AKP has subscribed to and presented an understanding ofdevelopment as a spillover of economic growth, with the illusion that growthimplies a broad-based improvement of living standards. It has been well-documented, however, that not only the benefits of economic growth have beenhighly unequally shared across the society in this era (Güney, 2015), but also itscosts. The detrimental socio-ecological impacts associated with the disruption,dislocation and dispossession inherent to the AKP’s developmental strategy havebeen shouldered by the already-disadvantaged sections of the society and thusperpetuated the existing socio-economic inequalities.

The results of these policies poinst to the broader need to question the desirabilityof economic growth as an objective of relentless pursuit and to radically rethink anddemocratize the notion of development. Within this context, Peoples’ DemocraticParty (HDP)’s vision of “new life” and of the democratization of the economy isespecially noteworthy. This vision defines the re-constitution of the economicsphere along egalitarian, solidaristic, gender-equal and ecological lines as anintegral component of a healthy and secure living. In doing so, it prioritizes the re-embedding of the economy within the society and its democratization (Madra, 2015),rather than fetishizing economic growth or positing a pre-conceived notion ofdevelopment. It remains to be seen how far the HDP will get in realizing this vision,but even the new imagination and understanding of the prosperity that it animatesmerits appreciation.

Source



Source

Adaman, Fikret, Bengi Akbulut, Yahya M. Madra and Sevket Pamuk. 2014.“Hitting the Wall: Erdoğan’s construction-based, finance-led growth regime”,The Middle East in London, April-May, 2014.

Akbulut, Bengi and Fikret Adaman. 2013. “The Unbearable Charm ofModernization: Growth Fetishism and the Making of State in Turkey”Perspectives: Political Analysis and Commentary from Turkey, 5.13

Ataay, Faruk. 2005. “Bölgesel Kalkınma Ajansları Modelinin ‘Kalkınma’ Anlayışı”

Gündoğdu, İbrahim. 2009. “Sermayenin Bölgesel Kalkınma Eğilim(ler)i:Kalkınma Ajansları Yasası Üzerine Tarihsel-Coğrafi Materyalist Bir İnceleme”,Praksis, 19.

Güney, K. Murat. 2015. “Ekonomi Kimin İçin Büyüyor? Türkiye’de ServetBölüşümü Adaletsizliği”.

Hoşgör, Evren. 2011. “Islamic Capital/Anatolian Tigers: Past and Present”,Middle Eastern Studies, 47 (2).

Madra, Yahya. 2015. “Ekonominin Demokratikleştirilmesi Olarak Yeni Yaşamınİnşası”.

State Planning Organization, 2006. 9th Development Plan.

State Planning Organization, 2013. 10th Development Plan.

Ulukan, Umut. 2013. “Devlet, Tarım ve Sermaye. Tarımda Kapitalist DönüşümüYeniden Tartışmak”, Eğitim Bilim Toplum Dergisi, 11 (43).

1 Contract farming lowers the risk since the producers know what, when and howmuch to produce in return for a guaranteed sale at established prices. It alsomeans, however, that the contractor dictates the terms, including the prices, and

http://www.sendika.org/2005/10/bolgesel-kalkinma-ajanslari-modelinin-kalkinma-anlayisi-faruk-ataay/

http://riturkey.org/2015/05/ekonomi-kimin-icin-buyuyor-turkiyede-servet-bolusumu-adaletsizligi-k-murat-guney/

http://www.bianet.org/bianet/siyaset/164069-ekonominin-demokratiklestirilmesi-olarak-yeni-yasamin-insasi

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the producer has little bargaining power as s/he often has no outside option ofmarketing the produce once committed to the contract.

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Development as in-justice: An Evaluation of Justice and Development Party’s development strategies

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