Abstract This article offers the first systematic assessment of environmental studies (ES) on Turkey over the past decade (2013–2023), situating its development against the backdrop of intensifying ecological crises and shifting academic paradigms. Drawing on a dataset of 585 journal articles and book chapters indexed in the Web of Science, complemented by manual coding and interviews with scholars across disciplines, we map the thematic, methodological, and institutional trajectories of the field. Our findings reveal a significant growth in ES, with climate change, sustainability, and energy emerging as dominant themes, and gender representation among scholars showing relative balance. Yet this expansion is uneven: research remains clustered in a few universities, more reliant on quantitative approaches, and largely shaped by economics, management, and political sciences. Critical perspectives, particularly those engaging grassroots mobilizations, environmental justice, and post-anthropocentric frameworks exist, but cannot dominate. Interviews further highlight the persistent ambivalence of scholars toward ES as a disciplinary identity, raising questions about whether the field is coalescing or persisting as fragmented conversations. By charting both the advances and enduring oversights of ES on Turkey, this study contributes to global debates on the institutionalization of environmental knowledge and points toward more inclusive, interdisciplinary, and justice-oriented futures.
Kızıldağ et al. (Wed,) studied this question.