Is the use of green certification strategic or not?

Differentiation strategies are the most preferred strategies when it comes to surviving in a highly competitive environment. And the debate as to whether using sustainability for strategic positioning, e.g differentiation, is still a hot topic in literature. To that end, we investigated if green certification of 17 Turkish ports have been used with similar purpose. In this context, this study aims to find out whether the certification attempts of "green ports" in ports that are strategic nodes of global supply chains are strategically justified or just an action to catch up with other competitors. Drawing on qualitative analyses, a green port corpus content has been prepared. This corpus is comprised of 17 green certificated port CEOs’ interviews and their website contents. The results indicate that the Turkish ports generally carry out practices that follow the trends in the world, but they mostly implement them to imitate rather than being strategic.