REVALUE-PG · Extractive Expansion and Antisystemic Environmentalism: A Socio-ecological Class Perspective to the Politics of Postgrowth and Revaluation of Nature

REVALUE-PG aims to explore the historical relationship between global extractivism, socio-ecological transformation, agrarian/environmental justice movements, and the politics of postgrowth transition through a conceptual and methodological integration between development studies and environmental studies, particularly the fields of historical sociology and political economy of development, ecological economics, and political ecology. The growth of the social metabolism of the world economy has engendered a global extractive expansion into the rural-natural ecosystems through the formation of extractive commodity frontiers. A central hypothesis is that the current economic rationality of growth grounded in capital accumulation facilitates commodification of nature leading to its socio-cultural and ecological devaluation. The purpose of this project is to understand how global extractivism produces a politics of socio-environmental movements that operate as anti-systemic social forces calling for alternative social forms and practices of organizing and regulating social metabolism and social relations of (re)production and, thereby, shaping grassroot frameworks for a systemic postgrowth transition. In exploring antisystemic environmentalism, it proposes a socio-ecological understanding of class and aims to deepen an account of class dynamics present in socio-environmental conflicts and politics in challenging and politicizing the capitalist relations of extraction. It seeks to explore how postgrowth transition requires a political-economic revaluation of nature outside the commodity form, predicated on socio-ecological rationality. REVALUE-PG focuses on the geographical instance of Türkiye to conduct an in-depth empirical research, as Türkiye has recently exposed the links between the extractivist expansion in rural areas as one of the main backbones of the national politics of economic growth and the expansion of the political field of environmental justice.