ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to the analysis of the political economy of Istanbul citizens’ participation in environmental improvement. More specifically, the paper seeks to focus on, on the basis of the results of a survey study conducted in December 1998 with a sample size of 1565, regarding Istanbul citizens’ concerns and attitudes towards the protection of the environment, together with the relationship between their willingness to contribute to projects aiming at easing or solving environmental problems and their trust in different political and social institutions. To better interpret the results of this survey, a set of complementary in-depth interviews was also carried out with representatives of business, NGOs, trade unions and bureaucrats, with regard to their positions on, and their preferred solutions to, environmental problems. These in-depth interviews also probed respondents’ positions on possible actions that can be taken at local/national/global levels with regard to environmental protection and their 1 This paper is based on a research undertaken with an award under the Middle East Research Awards Program in Population and Development (MEAwards) of the Population Council (Project: MEA 385), for which the authors are grateful. The authors would also like to thank, without implicating, Begüm Özkaynak for her very able assistance, the FREKANS Research Company for their careful work in conducting the survey, and Cem Behar, Ali Çarkoğlu, Korel Göymen, Oğuz Işık, Martin O’Brian, Begüm Özkaynak, İnsan Tunalı and Tansel Yılmazer for their stimulating comments. This paper has some overlapping points with an earlier paper of one of us (Adaman, [1]) as well as two companion papers (Zenginobuz et al., [2], Gökşen et al., [3]) that are based on the mentioned study.
