The governance of common resources: the political ecology of the Kaş-Kekova region

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the problems associated with marine resource access and its governance from a political ecology perspective. Taking the political ecology literature on environmental regulation in Turkey as a departure point, the argument that the Turkish state is unwilling and/or incapable to ensure environmental protection is followed. The thesis investigates the relevance of this argument on a given locality and explores how the political ecology of environmental conservation failure manifests and reproduces itself in the Kaş-Kekova case. Kaş-Kekova is a Special Environmentally Protected Area on the southwestern coast of Turkey that faces degradation in its marine environment in terms of biodiversity and pollution. Relying on the fieldwork in which focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with ten local stakeholder groups were conducted, the objective was to find out how these groups position themselves towards five marine conservation options in the Kaş-Kekova region. The information gathered from the field is used to analyze to what extent actors’ interests converge and how likely they are to form coalitions with each other based on the pairwise comparison technique of Novel Approach to Imprecise Decision Environments (NAIADE) method. By analyzing this specific case, this thesis aims to contribute to the political ecology literature of Turkey regarding marine resource governance.