Revisiting policy and practices of sustainable development in Turkey

Environmental decline has been a global concern for all humanity and living species for many years. Despite the ongoing global response to increasing environmental degradation, the world still faces unrelenting environmental decline. Turkey sees sustainable development and green growth as responses to environmental decline while maintaining steady growth. The key issue here is how to manage/reduce environmental decline without jeopardizing rapid growth to meet the needs of the current generation. Therefore, this article analyzes sustainable development in Turkey in terms of policy and practices. For this purpose, it first presents a literature review on environmentalism, sustainable development and green growth, and then scrutinizes sustainable development policy and practices in Turkey. Briefly, although Turkey has embraced the policies of environmental conservation, Turkey’s core environmental discourse favors the steady growth and industrialization while ensuring the environmental conservation. Bear in mind that Turkey is still grappling with rapid growth to sustain a livable life for every citizen. As a result, the state is striving to balance various policies and the interests of many stakeholders to achieve sustainable development.