Imagining Decent Work towards a Green Future in a Former Forest Village of the City of Istanbul

Abstract

This paper addresses issues pertaining to the future of work and sustainability through the lens of a case study of ecological deterioration and how it destroys and creates green jobs in a forest village of Istanbul. As elsewhere in major urban centres of developing countries, the hyper-expansion of city regions due to authoritarian developmentalism fosters the state-led construction sector in Turkey. Growth-driven economic policies continue to have adverse effects on the environment, resulting in deforestation among an array of ecological damage. Based on a qualitative analysis of oral history interviews and observations informed by a larger interdisciplinary research project, we observe resilience in the forest village under scrutiny as certain types of work are abandoned, and new forms are created by adaptation to the ecological and social conditions. The perceptions of changing conditions by locals vary across existing ethnic, gender, and class hierarchies in the local community. Moreover, our findings indicate that the types of work available in the village prior to urban transformation were not all decent or green. In face of ongoing ecological deterioration in a (formerly) forest community, participatory micro-initiatives, and grassroots, utilizing local community projects emerge that nevertheless pursue a green and just transition. We focus on one such initiative, the Community Fungi platform, to demonstrate the possibility of working towards a collective imagination of a green future inspired by past but unforgotten sustainable communal practices, in the context of the forest village under scrutiny in this paper.

Human Resource Management Practices and Decent Work in UN Global Compact: A Qualitative Analysis of Participants’ Reports

“…Despite being a recent concept, various papers on DW have been released in the scientific literature. This is due to the impact of events such as the economic crisis of 2008/2009, which resulted in high unemployment rates and vulnerable work conditions, raising awareness to the importance of DW (e.g., Ferraro et al 2016;Pereira et al 2019) and also concerns with green transition side by side with DW concerns (Dziewulska and Lewis 2023;Selçuk et al 2023). A literature review of empirical studies on DW in the field of psychology conducted by Pereira et al (2019) showed that few studies addressed all dimensions of DW.…”