Authoritarianism, Populism, and the Environment in Turkey ONUR İ NAL , University of Vienna The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s leadership rose to power in 2002 and has been the incumbent party in Turkey since then. For the past two decades, Erdoğan has restructured the Turkish state apparatus to consolidate power into his own hands. 1 He has formed and broken alliances between different players in politics, changed his tone on foreign and domestic issues, and ultimately installed an autocratic re- gime that is packaged as a presidential system. From the beginning, however, Erdoğan has subscribed to a neoliberal economic policy that has relied on and been reinforced by a complex constellation of au- thoritarian, populist, and developmentalist practices. The environ- ment was a major area where his authoritarian regime, combined with his populist rhetoric and developmentalist vision, has surfaced. 2 Public housing, energy, and construction are the sectors where Er- doğan’s “three-pillared neoliberalism” has been most conspicuous. 3 His neoliberal-extractivist economic regime, on the other hand, has had devastating impacts on the society and environment, sparking grassroots environmental movements across the country. These move- ments have been mainly community-based, organized resistance move- ments, yet, with the exception of the uprising that started at Gezi Park Environmental History, volume 27, number 4, October 2022. © 2022 Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History. All rights reserved. Pub- lished by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of American Society for Environ- mental History and the Forest History Society. https://doi.org/10.1086/721415 REFLECTIONS