Energy and development relationship: Turkish case

Energy resources have always been of capital importance to meet basic needs throughout the history of civilizations. However,thanks to the industrialisation period, radical changes in the patterns of production and consumption have reshaped the energy needs of societies.Development of societies has long been tied to economic growth realised through industrialisation. This has led to a system that is based on the use of intensive fossil energy spreading across the globe. Therefore, the concepts of energy and development are so strongly associated that it would be impossible to talk about the former without the latter.Nevertheless, the sustainability of this system has been opened to discussion since the energy crisis in 1970's and the environmental movement. On the one hand,countries, with the effects of the crisis, started their efforts to develop alternative energy resources in order to guarantee their energy security;and on the other,the effects of fossil energy usage on humans and the environment were started to be seriously discussed over the matters of global warming and the climate change. Thereby,the environment has been added into the relationship between the concepts of development and energy as a third one.Followingly, the matter of the environment has anywise been in the equation regarding process of energy policy-making.In this process, in which renewable energy resources are being discussed,countries started to add renewable energy resources to their energy policies with the motivation to guarantee a sustainable development process and/or as a way to ensure energy security. In this study, the matter of how the relationship of energy and development took shape in Turkey are considered. The effect of chosen development strategies over different time periods on the preference of energy source, thus the energy policies, in Turkey, where the industrialized West experience have been adopted as a way of development, are investigated. In this context. first chapter introduces the concept of energy and the state of energy resources in the World as well as in Turkey; second chapter argues the scope of energy policy as a sphere of politics; third chapter analyses the change in the perception of development over time; the last chapter of the study examines the appearance of the relationship between energy and development across the history of the Republic of Turkey. The study also offers policy proposals regarding the future of energy policies of Turkey.