Political ecology of milk production in Türkiye: Changing practices, rural livelihoods, and dairy animals

This thesis examines the transformation of dairy farming in Türkiye through a political ecology and multispecies justice lens, focusing on how intensification is framed, governed, and implemented. It argues that dairy intensification cannot be understood as a purely technical or inevitable response to production needs, but as the outcome of a historically shaped governance trajectory that prioritizes growth and efficiency. Empirically, the thesis combines close reading of policy and planning documents, sectoral reports, and statistical series with field material from a major sectoral event in Bursa and semi-structured interviews with the officials from the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in Istanbul. The analysis identifies two interconnected hegemonic discourses shaping dairy governance. The first is that milk production must expand and animals must become more "efficient" through yield increases, breed transformation, and reproductive and herd-management technologies. The second is that farmers must become more efficient by scaling up, specializing, formalizing, and integrating into industrial value chains, while small-scale farmers are framed as backward and inefficient. A key finding is the tension between official insistence that Türkiye "needs" more milk and the simultaneous portrayal of the country as already self-sufficient and a leading producer. Read together, these narratives suggest that the push for "more" milk reflects a political-economic commitment to growth as a default policy orientation. The thesis concludes that dairy intensification in Türkiye functions as a multispecies political project with uneven consequences for rural livelihoods and dairy animals.