Green Jobs at the Crossroads: Navigating Türkiye’s Labor Market in an Era of Green and Blue Transitions
Project Abstract:
In the context of global decarbonization efforts, this project explores the labor market implications of the green transition, specifically in Türkiye, an EU candidate country that has recently taken concrete steps in climate policy in response to the EU Green Deal’s carbon border adjustment mechanism. These transitions could stimulate job creation within the green economy while potentially presenting challenges, such as workforce displacement in carbon-intensive sectors. This study aims to explore these complex dynamics beyond the frequently analyzed context of industrialized nations, offering a comprehensive analysis of job creation, skill transferability, and employer perspectives within Türkiye’s green and blue economies through both quantitative and qualitative methods.
The research is organized into three work packages. The first focuses on identifying green jobs and assessing job creation potential within the green economy, considering the losses in polluting sectors. Utilizing a longitudinal administrative dataset, the project adopts a task-based classification approach to identify the greenness of occupations and conducts a spatial distribution analysis to explore job dynamics across various levels of greenness in different regions over time. The second work package analyzes the reallocation of workers, the transferability of skills from traditional to green jobs, and the quality of green job opportunities, with a particular emphasis on demographic impacts such as gender imbalances, using data from household labor force surveys. The analysis further leverages machine learning techniques for internal validation, specifically designed to align occupations across different taxonomies and to determine the proximity of skills between occupations. The third package delves into employer perspectives on the key drivers, challenges, and opportunities in developing green jobs, with semi-structured interviews that specifically highlight the blue economy to reveal distinct insights into the development of green jobs within this sector.
This project seeks to enrich the discourse on just transition by providing insights into the quality of green jobs, labor mobility, and skill requirements, thus equipping policymakers and stakeholders with robust evidence to formulate effective transition strategies. It underscores the necessity not only to create green jobs but also to ensure these jobs are accessible and of high quality, aligning with broader sustainability and equity goals in the shift towards a greener economy.