POLITICS OF ELECTRICITY SECTOR PRIVATIZATIONS IN TURKEY: “MAXIMIZING FINANCE” FOR WHOM?

Date

2023-5

Author

Güngör, Ayadım Deniz

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This thesis considers the implications of the neoliberal transformation of development policy over the past four decades, specifically with reference to the World Bank and changes in its policy prescriptions for the global South since the 1980s. The thesis looks at neoliberal development policy in the context of the global accumulation crisis that has led to the “financialization of development”. It focuses on the MFD approach now being implemented by the World Bank, delineating its origins in global capitalist crisis, and how it is implicated in expanding debt relations across the global South. A second part considers the implementation of this policy with reference to the Turkish electricity sector, which has been undergoing a neoliberal transformation since the 1980s. An overview of the neoliberal restructuring of the Turkish electricity sector over the past decades reveals how the reforms to privatize and marketize the sector proceeded through crisis and are involved in the progressive internalization of financial motives into electricity provision. Within the context of the Turkish case study, the thesis also considers the expansion of debt relations in the provision of electricity with reference to the privatization of the state electricity distributor TEDAŞ. It is found that the TEDAŞ privatization, considered a “successful” example of reform within the Bank’s MFD framework, was enabled through a massive incurrence of debt by domestic capital which then resulted in crisis and new forms of indebtedness across the electricity service chain. The main finding is that the neoliberalization of development through World Bank policies is linked with financialization and the dissemination of debt as a mode of capitalist crisis management across the global South.

Subject Keywords

World Bank, Maximizing Finance for Development (MFD), Electricity Sector Privatization, TEDAŞ, Debt

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/103607

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis