Achieving modernization and economic progress has been a long-standing objective of Turkish policymakers, one that has received remarkably little contestation from the side of a wide range of ideologies within Turkish politics. Consequently, growth policies have been given priority, based on the assumption that their achievement would automatically resolve social and political issues, and debates on how to best promote economic growth have always dominated the political landscape. Indeed, the roots of this undisputed appeal and dominance of growth-oriented modernization can be located within the configuration of state-society relationships; in particular, the way that the state established and legitimized itself. Fulfilling the promise of the ideal of modernization enabled the Turkish state to represent itself as a neutral institution that embodied the collective will of the people, and thus acquire the consent of the society to its claim rule, i.e. constituted its hegemonic project. While the undisputed appeal of growth and modernization has changed little, its operationalization has undergone radical shifts within the last decade. In particular within the case of hydro-power, the dominance of state-led/owned large infrastructures is replaced with small-scale hydro-power plants undertaken by the private sector within the contemporary era. This shift was also marked with the emergence of numerous local resistances in response, unprecedented in their prevalence and the public attention they received. Yet the numerous conflicts sparked by these projects stand in contrast with the relatively little contestation that the large-scale dams have produced in the past. This presentation explains this contrast by the ineffectiveness of small-scale hydropower plants in (re)producing consent to the state’s claim to rule. In doing so, it builds on Gramscian political ecoloy and employs the findings of a case study conducted in Northeastern Anatolia. More specifically, it is argued that the dams have invoked an image of the nation as a unified collective, where all has to (somewhat reciprocally) sacrifice and is compensated by the fruits of modernization, and that of the state as a deliverer of modernization who arbitrates neutrally. Small-scale hydropower plants, on the other hand, are marked by the absence of such consent-building to state power.