Current Research Interest

My research consists of broader range of topics such as securitization, hydro-politics, neoliberalized natures, and sustainable development and water governance. I am interested in knowledge formation in the field of water governance through the strategic interactions of various actors such as state, private companies and multilateral institutions (IMF, World Bank, EU) as well as NGOs. Furthermore, I critically analyze differentiated social and political implications of the water policies (such as hydropower and privatization) both at the national and international level. In line with that, I look at various perceptions on property rights, ownership patterns, and issues of justice. Moreover I am also interested in the effectiveness of the participatory approach as a pathway towards sustainability. Public participation is among the hot topics of water management due to the changing role of the governmental and non-governmental actors in water management. Previous experiences with public participation in the broader sphere of environmental decision-making are limited yet increasing. In line with that, I deal with the participatory process in hydropower development by analyzing social movements. In many cases, non-participation has also become a position since some argue that participation means an indirect support of a proposed project or idea. In accordance with that, I explore the question of how the idea of ‘representativeness´ can be extended in a way that include opposite views and interests of those who are truly affected (including future generations).

Moreover, I have been a visiting fellow at the Institute of Resource, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) in the University of British Columbia where I worked with Dr. Leila Harris about the contemporary environmental governance practices in Turkey.

As a part of the LUCID research group, I am working on an interdisciplinary project called “enclosure of commons” with two of my colleagues, Melissa Hansen and Torsten Krause. We are working on various case studies (in Turkey, South Africa and Ecuador) where common resources (land, forest, water etc.) are enclosed by state or private actors in the name of development. Our aim is to show how enclosure is understood by communities,  officials, NGOs, and what new relations are produced in this process.

Teaching

Since 2009 I have been a teaching assistant for master level courses;
a) Ideas behind Economy, Environment and Society course where I gave lectures, seminars on classical and contemporary theories of state, international relations and environmental politics
b) Water and Sustainability Course
c) (Un)sustainable Asia course about social perceptions of water.
I am currently supervising 2 master students from LUMES about community based water management and dam removal projects.

PhD project

My PhD project focuses on the case of Turkey where water usage rights of national and transboundary rivers are transferred to private sector for the production of hydroelectricity. I aim to answer the effects of this process on the patterns of ownership, state-society relations, social and environmental livelihoods. By analyzing the impacts of private hydropower development my study contributes to the debate on water privatization in rural areas where rivers are the main arteries of livelihoods, irrigation and sources of drinking water. Also, I question the renewable energy solutions and thus the sustainability of run-of- river hydro projects by addressing the issues of justice and fairness, control of and access to water. I argue that the multifaceted structure of water governance in the assessment of the decisions to construct hydropower plants and the importance of social struggles affecting these decisions should be acknowledged. Here, I address the procedural problems in the implementation process of hydropower. Lack of participatory mechanism in the decision making process is the main source of social conflicts and leads to politics of exclusion. The empirical evidence from the fieldwork in Black sea region and South Anatolia, indicates the complexity of water privatization in the rural context and different valuations of river attributed by state, private actors as well as local communities.

More specifically, I pose the following research questions:

• What are the recent environmental governance changes in Turkey that could be described as neoliberal? To what extent are decentralization and privatization of water ‘new’ to the Turkish context? 
• What are the implications of privatized hydropower development in relation to the regimes of entitlements to water? Is this a case of water grabbing? (Who gets what for how long and what do they do with the surplus wealth?)
• How are rivers constituted as governable and how has the governance of rivers changed and reconfigured the property relations and rights to water?
• During the hydropower development, how have rivers become sites of contestation in which various actors struggle for their own representations of river? What forms of social resistance take place?
• How can we extend the debates on privatization of water beyond the urban context?
• What is the involvement of non-governmental actors in the decision-making processes of hydropower development? To what extent are local actors represented in the participatory processes?

Publications and Conference papers

Ozerol, G., Ozen, A and Islar, M. (forthcoming, 2012) Translating Integrated Water Resources Management to Turkish: The Case of Public Participation in Water Management in de Boer, C., Vinke-de Kruijf, J., Özerol, G. and H. Bressers (eds.), Water Governance, Policy and Knowledge Transfer: International Studies on Contextual Water Management, Earthscan (Taylor & Francis Group).

Islar, M. (in press, 2012) Struggles for recognition: Privatization of Water Use Rights of Turkish Rivers. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability.

Islar, M. (in progress) Privatized Hydro Power: ‘Water Grabbing’ for Energy in Turkey? TBA.

Islar, M. (2011) Rivers and Struggles: Water rights movements in Turkey. Presented at the International Conference of the European Society for Ecological Economics, June 14-17, 2011 at Bogaziçi University, Istanbul.

Nastar. M, Islar, M. (2011) Decentralization: Resolve or Hide the Problem? Presented at IASC conference, Hyderabad, India 2011

Islar, M. (2010) Privatized Rivers of Turkey: The Case of Yuvarlakcay, paper presented at the Berlin Conference on Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change., 8-9 October 2010, Berlin.

Islar, M. (2010) Unsustainable Environments: The Case of River Privatization. Presented at Brief Environmental History of Neoliberalism Conference in Lund.

Islar, M. (2009) Crisis of Water: Interrogating Neo-Liberal Water Discourses in Turkey. Presented at Third IIPPE International Research Workshop.  Available from:
http://www.iippe.org/wiki/Third_IIPPE_International_Research_Workshop 

Islar, M and Ramasar, V. (2009)  Security to All: Allocating the Waters of Euphrates and Tigris. Presented in Earth System Governance Conference.
Available from:
http://www.earthsystemgovernance.org/ac2009/papers/AC2009-0275.pdf