HORIZON EUROPA REVALUE-PG Project: Extractive expansion and anti-systemic environmentalism: A socio-ecological class perspective on post-growth policies and nature revaluation

REVALUE-PG seeks to explore the historical relationship between global extractivism, socio-ecological transformation, agrarian and environmental justice movements, and the politics of post-growth transition by integrating conceptual and methodological approaches to development studies and environmental studies, particularly the fields of historical sociology and the political economy of development, ecological economics, and political ecology. The growth of the social metabolism of the global economy has generated a global extractive expansion into rural-natural ecosystems through the formation of extractive commodity frontiers.

A central hypothesis is that the current economic rationale for growth, based on capital accumulation, facilitates the commodification of nature, leading to its sociocultural and ecological devaluation. The purpose of this project is to understand how global extractivism generates a politics of socio-environmental movements that operate as anti-systemic social forces demanding alternative social forms and practices to organize and regulate social metabolism and the social relations of (re)production and, therefore, to configure underlying frameworks for a systemic transition to post-growth.

By exploring anti-systemic environmentalism, it proposes a socio-ecological understanding of class and seeks to further explain the class dynamics at play in socio-environmental conflicts and politics by challenging and politicizing capitalist relations of extraction. It seeks to explore how the post-growth transition requires a political-economic revaluation of nature beyond its commodity form, based on socio-ecological rationality. REVALUE-PG focuses on the geographical location of Turkey to conduct a thorough empirical investigation, given that Turkey has recently exposed the links between extractive expansion in rural areas, one of the pillars of national economic growth policy, and the expansion of the political field of environmental justice.