Presentation short abstract

The paper analyses the Yayla Tourism Corridor in Turkey, arguing that despite sustainability claims, it commodifies mountain environments, enables a rentier eco-tourism entrepreneur class, and disrupts long-standing pasture practices, producing new tensions in the Eastern Black Sea highlands.

Presentation long abstract

Shaped by mountainous rural geography, the Eastern Black Sea Region had historically occupied a peripheral position within Turkey’s tourism economy, with its yaylas (highland pastures) serving primarily as seasonal grazing grounds for pastoral communities. However, as Turkey has sought to diversify its tourism portfolio beyond mass coastal tourism in the Mediterranean region and started to promote ‘alternative’ products with the growing influence of sustainable development discourses since the early 2000s, the region has become a prime site for state-led nature-based tourism initiatives. Within this context, it has been reimagined by the state as a ‘green’ frontier to be opened up for tourism growth; consequently, the Yayla Tourism Corridor project has been initiated as a top-down intervention aimed at integrating ‘idle’ highland pastures and protected mountain areas into tourism market. This paper problematises the corridor project in terms of its stated rationales and its uneven socio-economic impacts. Drawing on fieldwork findings and policy analysis, it argues, first, that although official narratives present the project as a sustainable and revitalising intervention, in essence, it advances a pro-market response to the region’s long-standing peripheralisation in Turkey’s development by commodifying nonhuman natures and opening new spaces for capital accumulation. Second, the paper demonstrates that while the project enables the emergence of a new class of rentier eco-tourism entrepreneurs, who capture revenues through land ownership and close ties with the government, tourism-oriented land uses and rising visitor pressures increasingly unsettle established patterns of pasture use, creating new intra-community tensions over access, mobility, and competing expectations.