By the end of 2020, Turkey’s long awaited Ilisu dam project will be complete. Turkey argues this new dam will bring power independence and shore up economic stability. As an added bonus, it ensures water resiliency in a water-scarce region. Meanwhile, environmentalists bemoan habitat destruction, and Iraqis worry about water shortages they will experience down river. For the Kurds, the Ilisu dam project wipes out thousands of years of culture. For them, it’s the latest in a methodical cultural extermination which has been their plight since the founding of the Republic of Turkey.

If you haven’t been closely monitoring the Kurds plight, you wouldn’t know that the flooding of Hasakeyf and surrounding settlements—some of the oldest continually inhabited areas of the world—was part of a deliberate effort to deny the Kurds their own identity, history, and cultural heritage. And even if you have, perhaps, heard of the Turks bombing the Kurds in June, or other incidents that have occurred over the years, you might not grasp the full extent of the situation. But by the end of this year when the dam is scheduled to be fully operational, pieces of Kurdish culture will once again disappear, this time as Turkey builds its climate resilience and power independence.

Erased Cultural Identity

Since Turkey was founded, President Ataturk’s vision for a unified Turkish identity has led to systematic erasure of Kurdish identity including a ban on Kurdish language, stories, cultural practices, and their name, as they were once rebranded “Mountain Turks.” Later, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) was formed to counteract some of this suppression. They would quickly be labeled a terrorist group. The terrorist designation allowed the Turks to target Kurds and would ultimately drive the PKK out of Turkey and into Iraq for a time, leading to Turkish interference in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Using the smokescreen of resilience-building efforts to hide systematic oppression is a new tactic for the Turks, but not altogether unexpected. This is not the first, nor will it be the last time that sustainability and resilience are leveraged as acceptable reasons for regimes to oppress minority populations. In the name of development, the rights of indigenous, poor, and minority populations are often disregarded. We’ve seen it before, and we’re seeing today, for example, in the Philippines.

However, we may not always be able to recognize the most egregious of these slights because we do not have an accurate or holistic cultural understanding of the situation. This is not necessarily the case in Turkey. But without this kind of understanding elsewhere, the international community may applaud efforts made in the name of climate resilience that harm communities and cultures. In turn, we might bungle attempts to ensure climate resilience because we choose a method or tool that is incompatible with the cultural practices the communities espouse.   

Developing Cultural Intelligence

A culturally savvy approach to climate resilience will be invaluable in creating lasting solutions. As in the world of technological fixes, one size does not fit all. However, cultural and market awareness can help tailor the approaches to resilience that work in one location so that they may work in other locations. With a little more tact and a slower, more methodical understanding of the places where help is needed, we might see higher rates of successful resilience building.  

How do we become more culturally savvy? Well, there’s a paradigm for that.

Strategic culture—a paradigm from international relations theory—asserts that all strategic decisions are at some level influenced by a community’s norms, myths, and history. Strategic culturalists seek to identify these influencing factors, and as a result, develop deep understandings of the cultural trip wires that might prevent an outside solution from being effective. Strategic culture highlights the systematic inequalities that the outside eye may not perceive and shows us the pathways for understanding how we might, through unintentional or intentional benevolent coloniality, create more problematic structures by suggesting or enforcing resilience solutions which have worked elsewhere.

In China, strategic culture heavily impacted the development of the Three Gorges Dam. This undertaking, the largest hydropower project ever built, was announced with the alleged goal of preventing flooding along the Yangtze River. However, with a strategic culture understanding, we can see at least three tenets of China’s strategic culture in this decision-making process—demonstration of technological prowess, acceleration of economic development, and national pride—all of which led to forward momentum for the project despite environmental and displacement concerns. In June, the region saw its heaviest rainfall in 60 years, and while the dam proved effective at curtailing some flooding, it is limited in its ability to contain cascading floods, in some cases making downstream impacts worse.  

Strategic culture can help us more easily spot instances of environmental injustice. We already know that climate change will impact the poorest populations first. While the intersection between the poorest global populations and oppressed minorities is quite extensive, strategic culture in environmental resilience planning can help us to prevent environmental resilience from becoming the smokescreen for oppression that “development” became. While movements with the best intentions and ideas have been coopted to oppress peoples and cultures before, we can work to ensure that climate resilience is not one of them.

Cultural Differences Undermine Resilience

We have long known that innovative technologies and approaches to providing resilience to water insecurity and climate unrest have the tendency to slip into what is known as “benevolent coloniality” in which developed countries assume that the answers and solutions they have created for their own resilience will work anywhere. Put simply: we want to believe in the universality of a technological solution and refuse to accept that it might not work. In cases where benevolent coloniality has been allowed to thrive, instead of being held in check, we’ve seen broken systems due to complicated machinery, lack of access to replacement parts, or simple ineffectiveness because of cultural differences.

The technological incompatibility is one way that resilience efforts may fail to solve problems, and in the process, create more. It’s also possible that those implementing the systems did not take the time to understand the cultures in which they must function. As a result, resilience-building measures may fall short due to implementers’ inability to culturally adapt.

Recently, researchers wrote of the biases we find in Artificial Intelligence which stem from coloniality; they specifically highlight programs which tout “AI for sustainable development.” These programs offer AI systems which have already been developed for one cultural context, but which are incompatible anywhere else. This assumption means that they do not offer the opportunity for the community to work with developers in creating an appropriate system. This lack of cultural awareness shows where a strategic culture approach is not only helpful, but necessary.

We desperately need initiatives to bolster global climate resilience, but if those initiatives fail to be culturally sensitive they will only deepen inequity and ultimately exacerbate the risk faced by the poorest, least resilient populations. Strategic culture is not a silver bullet to fix the problems of inequity in climate resilience. However, strategic culture is one of many tools we can leverage for more equitable resilience, one we very much need to deploy.