AbstractsGeography &GIS

This dissertation interrogates connections between agricultural restructuring, development of rural livelihoods and conservation of agricultural biodiversity (agrobiodiversity) in Turkey, a center of origin and diversity for wheat domestication. Often, crisis narratives accompany these connections, reflected as simplified assumptions about transformations of nature, livelihoods and the state under neoliberalism. Through a multiscalar analysis that attends to state-international relations, ways the state articulates development and conservation policies and ways farmers engage with these policies, this dissertation argues that the crisis narrative is used to justify dominant solutions for conservation of agrobiodiversity and development of livelihoods. By engaging with different aspects of transformation under neoliberalism, in particular Turkey’s 2006 Seed Law, the World Bank funded Agricultural Reform Implementation Program, and changes due to European Union accession, the dissertation treats current transformations as a snapshot of complex change for the role of the state, farmers’ livelihoods and conservation of agrobiodiversity.The dissertation shows how neoliberal development and conservation practices have come to dominate (and yet appear beyond the reach of) global economic, political and environmental policy circles, and demonstrates the effects of such practices on access to agrobiodiversity and livelihood strategies. The dissertation is based on empirical research and archival work conducted in Turkey over eight months between 2007 and 2010. Methods included (1) semi-structured interviews with state officials and representatives of international, farmer and non-governmental organizations in Ankara and (2) ethnographic research and participant observation in the villages of two provinces in northwest and central Turkey, Kastamonu and Sivas, where traditional wheat varieties are grown. I link the empirical findings to broader analysis that connects North and South by drawing on postcolonial theory, development geography and political ecology to make two broad arguments. (1) Instead of a moment of crisis that can be solved through neoliberalism, current development practices in Turkey reflect both power struggles within the state and the historical continuity of earlier state projects of modernization and Europeanization. (2) The effects of markets on conservation of agrobiodiversity and livelihoods were diverse and contingent on internal dynamics of perceptions and articulations of farmers with external dynamics of interventions at local or national scale. As a result, neoliberal conservation cannot fulfill its double promise of serving livelihoods and conservation of nature. By challenging the crisis narrative, these findings contribute to our understanding of sustainability of development and conservation more broadly, particular with regard to food security, farming communities, and crop improvement in developing country contexts. First, these findings show that neoliberalism translates into local contexts…