Green grabbing

One day, they arrive in your village, speaking of a vital wind farm to save the planet—and grab your ancestral land. Not only do they fail to seek your consent, but they don’t even consult you or your community.

Your entire life is irreversibly changed by a private company’s so-called “green” investments. This is what we call green grabbing—the appropriation of land and property under a green disguise.

In traditional land grabbing, an area is expropriated under the pretext of “common good. ”It is then typically sold or leased to for profit enterprises.

You are left without your land, your home, or your rights. “Common good” is often a legal cover for dispossession.

Green grabbing is no different; it just sounds greener: protecting nature, combating climate change, promoting eco-tourism, or creating urban forests. But displacement, dispossession, and marginalization remain the same.

This time, however, the justification goes beyond public interest—it is allegedly “for the sake of the planet.” As a result, rightful objections can easily be dismissed as opposition to green transition.

Academics Fikret Adaman, Duygu Avcı, Hande Paker, and Gökçe Yeniev explore the issue in their e-paper “Green grabbing: A new form of appropriation,” written for the Heinrich Böll Stiftung İstanbul Office.

The authors also provide examples of green grabbing from Turkey, highlighting the shared fate of those dispossessed—whether in the Black Sea region for hydroelectric power plants or in the Aegean for wind and geothermal energy projects.

According to the e-paper, there are ways to prevent green policies from becoming mere reproductions of the exploitative and destructive models they seek to replace.

At the top of the list: Ensuring that climate action is combined with social justice and systemic critique.

You can download this 13-page e-paper for free.