Beste Gün Aslan is a PhD candidate at CENSE, NOVA School of Science and Technology FCT NOVA since 2022. Her academic interests concentrate around the fields of ecological economics, philosophy of science, political ecology; theories of value, of rationality; and specific topics that can be exemplified (and not exhausted) as just transition, labour environmentalism, energy transition from fossil fuels, coal, biodiversity accounting, ecosystem services, environmental valuation, socio-ecological indicators for sustainability, calculation debate, environmental justice, degrowth and ecosocialism. She firmly believes that what unifies these various distinct research interests is that they provide conceptual tools towards an ethos in practice. To reflect this transdisciplinarity, her research bridges the two distinct research areas of CENSE, namely Ecological Economics & Environmental Management and Energy & Climate. More specifically, her PhD thesis is exploring the indicators for just energy transition in their potential to integrate plural values of stakeholders included in just transition, as well as the potential of the term just transition to be conceptualized as a part of broader socio-ecological transformation to a sustainable future. She holds an M.A. degree in Economics, and B.A. degrees in Economics and Philosophy from Bogazici University, Istanbul. Her M.A. thesis focuses on the institutional conditions for economic valuation to sustain rectificatory justice, based on an extensive oil spill case study in Gencelli Bay in order to extend the basic Ecosystem Services analysis with plural values of stakeholders, and funded by TEMA (Turkish Foundation for Combatting Soil Erosion). Prior to joining CENSE, she has worked as a Research and Teaching Assistant at Kadir Has University Department of Economics, as an Independent Researcher in the fields of energy, Ecosystem Services, ESG disclosures of corporate sector for various NGOs and organizations, and taken up several roles such as researcher or project proposal writer in the project development area, mainly EU-funded projects in Turkey.
