Ada Duru Ak
Class of 2029 - Global Affairs
- aak@nd.edu
Project: Intern with the Grand National Assembly of Turkey
This past summer I interned at the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye, the Turkish parliament, with MP Hasan Öztürkmen, who represents Gaziantep, a province in southeastern Türkiye, for the CHP, one of the country's main opposition parties. The internship ran from May through July. Going in, I didn't have a clear picture of what my day to day would actually look like. What I found was an office managing several urgent, overlapping issues at once, and sustainability turned out to be at the center of most of them.
The clearest example was flooding. Right around when I started, Öztürkmen filed what's called a parliamentary research motion, a formal request for the government to investigate an issue and report back on flooding that had just hit Gaziantep. It asked for a damage assessment on homes and farmland and pushed for concrete measures in response. I came in at the point where the office was figuring out next steps: who to loop in, what to ask for, how to keep the motion from stalling. He'd already been raising issues facing the province's pistachio, red pepper, raisin, olive, olive oil, and sugar beet producers before the floods even hit, so I got a real sense from him of how precarious agricultural income already was in the region, and how much worse a flood makes that. Gaziantep is one of Türkiye's major agricultural provinces, and this flood added a new layer of strain onto an economy that was already stretched thin.
Housing was the second major piece. A written question, a formal tool MPs use to demand information from a government ministry, came in about payment problems in a public housing project in Şahinbey, a district of Gaziantep. Öztürkmen explained to me that the harder, less visible part of public housing is making sure the people it's meant for can actually afford to stay in it once it's occupied.
He also told me about a bill he'd co-signed on the use of rare earth elements for the country's benefit. Rare earth elements are essential to batteries, solar panels, and most clean energy technology, so how a country manages access to them matters a lot for its ability to actually build out that infrastructure. Hearing him talk about it showed me how wide the umbrella of sustainability policy actually is, and how much of it happens in places I wouldn't have thought to look.
Türkiye is hosting COP31 in Antalya this November, and pieces of the buildup landed while I was actually there. In May, just before I started, Türkiye held a "Road to COP31: Resilient Cities" forum in Hatay, epicenter of the 2023 earthquakes, producing a declaration to move "from recovery to transformation, from global commitments to local action." Then in June, COP31 President-Designate Murat Kurum launched "Electrify Now" at London Climate Action Week, pushing to lift electricity's share of global energy demand from around 20 percent to 35 percent by 2035, a target that matters because electrified systems waste far less energy than burning fuel directly, so it's one of the more efficient ways to cut emissions if the grid behind it is clean. Both are the kind of promises that sound big from a podium; watching Öztürkmen's office grind through a flood motion and a housing payment dispute all summer showed me what it actually takes to make good on them at the provincial level.
Alongside all of this, my daily work covered a lot of ground: running checks across social media and news to track constituent sentiment, helping draft and proofread speeches and statements, and walking resolutions through the building to collect signatures from other MPs' offices. None of that shows up in a headline on its own, but it's what keeps an office responsive to what a province actually needs week to week.
What this internship taught me about sustainability is that it rarely comes down to one clean initiative. It's flood recovery, agricultural precarity, housing follow-through, and even resource policy for the energy transition, all moving at once, and it requires an office to keep paying attention long after an issue stops being news.
Looking ahead, I want to keep tracking how the flood motion and the housing project develop, since both are still open. I'm also more interested now in disaster-risk transformation policy specifically, given how much of Gaziantep's recent history runs through both the 2023 earthquakes and this year's flooding. This internship gave me a much more grounded sense of what place-based, justice-centered, action-oriented work actually looks like in practice, and I'm grateful to Öztürkmen and his team for letting me be part of it this summer.
Biography
Major: Global Affairs
Project: Intern with the Grand National Assembly of Turkey
This past summer I interned at the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye, the Turkish parliament, with MP Hasan Öztürkmen, who represents Gaziantep, a province in southeastern Türkiye, for the CHP, one of the country's main opposition parties. The internship ran from May through July. Going in, I didn't have a clear picture of what my day to day would actually look like. What I found was an office managing several urgent, overlapping issues at once, and sustainability turned out to be at the center of most of them.
The clearest example was flooding. Right around when I started, Öztürkmen filed what's called a parliamentary research motion, a formal request for the government to investigate an issue and report back on flooding that had just hit Gaziantep. It asked for a damage assessment on homes and farmland and pushed for concrete measures in response. I came in at the point where the office was figuring out next steps: who to loop in, what to ask for, how to keep the motion from stalling. He'd already been raising issues facing the province's pistachio, red pepper, raisin, olive, olive oil, and sugar beet producers before the floods even hit, so I got a real sense from him of how precarious agricultural income already was in the region, and how much worse a flood makes that. Gaziantep is one of Türkiye's major agricultural provinces, and this flood added a new layer of strain onto an economy that was already stretched thin.
Housing was the second major piece. A written question, a formal tool MPs use to demand information from a government ministry, came in about payment problems in a public housing project in Şahinbey, a district of Gaziantep. Öztürkmen explained to me that the harder, less visible part of public housing is making sure the people it's meant for can actually afford to stay in it once it's occupied.
He also told me about a bill he'd co-signed on the use of rare earth elements for the country's benefit. Rare earth elements are essential to batteries, solar panels, and most clean energy technology, so how a country manages access to them matters a lot for its ability to actually build out that infrastructure. Hearing him talk about it showed me how wide the umbrella of sustainability policy actually is, and how much of it happens in places I wouldn't have thought to look.
Türkiye is hosting COP31 in Antalya this November, and pieces of the buildup landed while I was actually there. In May, just before I started, Türkiye held a "Road to COP31: Resilient Cities" forum in Hatay, epicenter of the 2023 earthquakes, producing a declaration to move "from recovery to transformation, from global commitments to local action." Then in June, COP31 President-Designate Murat Kurum launched "Electrify Now" at London Climate Action Week, pushing to lift electricity's share of global energy demand from around 20 percent to 35 percent by 2035, a target that matters because electrified systems waste far less energy than burning fuel directly, so it's one of the more efficient ways to cut emissions if the grid behind it is clean. Both are the kind of promises that sound big from a podium; watching Öztürkmen's office grind through a flood motion and a housing payment dispute all summer showed me what it actually takes to make good on them at the provincial level.
Alongside all of this, my daily work covered a lot of ground: running checks across social media and news to track constituent sentiment, helping draft and proofread speeches and statements, and walking resolutions through the building to collect signatures from other MPs' offices. None of that shows up in a headline on its own, but it's what keeps an office responsive to what a province actually needs week to week.
What this internship taught me about sustainability is that it rarely comes down to one clean initiative. It's flood recovery, agricultural precarity, housing follow-through, and even resource policy for the energy transition, all moving at once, and it requires an office to keep paying attention long after an issue stops being news.
Looking ahead, I want to keep tracking how the flood motion and the housing project develop, since both are still open. I'm also more interested now in disaster-risk transformation policy specifically, given how much of Gaziantep's recent history runs through both the 2023 earthquakes and this year's flooding. This internship gave me a much more grounded sense of what place-based, justice-centered, action-oriented work actually looks like in practice, and I'm grateful to Öztürkmen and his team for letting me be part of it this summer.