Biodiversity on paper: A comparative study of Türki̇ye's national reports under international environmental agreements

Abstract

This thesis investigates the characteristics of Türkiye's biodiversity policies and evaluates its engagement with international biodiversity agreements, specifically the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). It focuses on how biodiversity commitments are represented, framed, and justified in official national reports submitted to international institutions rather than evaluating biodiversity policies through their outcomes on the ground. In this sense, the thesis approaches biodiversity governance as a phenomenon that is often visible on paper through formal reporting mechanisms. In addition to Türkiye, the study includes a comparative analysis with four other countries: Germany, Australia, Kenya, and South Africa. These countries were selected to represent a range of positions in the global economic hierarchy (core, semi-periphery, periphery), which allows the analysis to show national reporting practices within broader structural patterns of global environmental governance. The research adopts a qualitative document analysis approach. It examines one national report submitted by Türkiye for each of the three selected biodiversity agreements: Türkiye's Sixth National Report to the CBD, Türkiye's National Report to the Ramsar Convention COP15, Türkiye's Implementation Report to CITES (2017–2019). These reports were analyzed to assess the depth, transparency, and completeness of Türkiye's reporting. Reports from the four other countries were also examined, and for comparability, one report per agreement was selected per country. For example, CITES reports covering the 2018–2020 period were used for Germany, Australia, and Kenya, while Türkiye's and South Africa's reports from 2017–2019 and 2015–2017 respectively were included due to format consistency. Additionally, the thesis compares the dates when each country signed and ratified the agreements to assess early versus late engagement. To interpret the findings, the study applies World-Systems Analysis. This perspective understands the global economy as a hierarchical system composed of core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral countries. Core countries dominate high profit gaining, high technological production while peripheral countries provide raw materials and cheap labor and semi-peripheral countries, like Türkiye, holds an in-between position. These structural positions affect countries' capacities and priorities in policy-making, including environmental governance. In this framework, semi-peripheral countries have several pressures: they must keep up with global economic growth while also complying with international standards. However, due to financial constraints, external debt, and reliance on development, their environmental policies are often compromised or delayed. This thesis uses this framework to argue that Türkiye's implementation of biodiversity agreements reflects not merely political will, but deeper systemic limitations and contradictions within the world economic structure. Across the three reports analyzed, Türkiye shows a recurring pattern of weak scientific substantiation and limited methodological transparency. A central shortcoming is the prevalence of high-level, declarative statements that are not followed by sufficient detail. Responses often mention activities or projects but do not specify the theory of change, target taxa or habitats, implementation timelines, or responsible institutions. As a result, it is difficult to evaluate whether reported actions are ecologically meaningful, scalable, or sustained beyond pilot phases. A second and more consequential limitation is the absence of verifiable evidence. The reports frequently frame conservation and management efforts as "successful" yet provide little quantitative support, such as baseline values, time series, monitoring protocols, or outcome indicators. Where data would be expected, for example population trends, habitat extent and condition, enforcement metrics, or ecological integrity measures, the reports rarely present numerical results, uncertainty ranges, or independent evaluations. This makes it difficult to distinguish between outputs and outcomes, and it limits the credibility of claims regarding species conservation, protected area effectiveness, and wetland management. Comparatively, similar gaps in detail and evidence appear in cases examined for Kenya and South Africa, where reporting can be constrained by data infrastructure and monitoring capacity. However, in Germany and Australia, reporting is generally more compatible with scientific assessment: indicators are more consistently used, monitoring frameworks are described, and limitations or failures are more explicitly acknowledged. The contrast suggests that Türkiye's engagement with international biodiversity governance is procedurally visible but substantively uneven. In practice, the reporting style functions more as compliance with a formal obligation than as a mechanism for learning, accountability, and adaptive management. This pattern is consistent with the logic of "emulation" as a diffusion mechanism: international norms and reporting templates are adopted to demonstrate alignment and legitimacy, while institutionalization and implementation remain partial. Importantly, the weakness observed here should not be reduced to a technical reporting problem alone. Biodiversity loss and conservation outcomes are shaped by political economy and cross-scale linkages. Frameworks such as ecologically unequal exchange, telecoupling, and structural adjustment help situate national performance within broader systems of extraction, trade, and fiscal governance that can constrain domestic capacity and reproduce ecological inequalities. By focusing on biodiversity "on paper" this thesis contributes to the literature by linking national environmental reporting practices to global structural inequalities. It highlights the need to evaluate international environmental commitments in terms of how reporting systems enable or fail to enable transparency, comparability, and meaningful assessment across countries. The case of Türkiye highlights the importance of considering a country's global economic role when evaluating its environmental performance. However, the study has limitations. It examines only one report per agreement, offering a static rather than dynamic view. It also relies solely on official documents, which may not reflect realities. Interviews, civil society reports, and independent evaluations were not included. Lastly, while World-Systems Analysis is useful for understanding structural conditions, it pays less attention to internal policy-making dynamics, actors, and institutions. This study found that Türkiye's environmental commitments under CBD, Ramsar, and CITES show formal alignment with global biodiversity goals, but the lack of data, monitoring, and transparency indicates that actual implementation remains limited. These gaps are not solely the result of national shortcomings, but are embedded in Türkiye's structural position in the global economy. Therefore, environmental problems like biodiversity loss must be addressed not only at the national level but also through reforms in global economic and political systems that allow for more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable policy outcomes. This thesis argues that effective biodiversity conservation in countries like Türkiye requires not just legal alignment with global treaties, but a transformation in the structural dynamics that shape environmental governance at both national and international levels.