Assessing the implementation and impact of Experimentalist Governance Architecture on the European Union’s Timber Regulation

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Assessing the implementation and impact of

Experimentalist Governance Architecture on

the European Union’s Timber Regulation

Zachariah Baljeu

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands Master thesis, Political Science: International Relations

Student ID: 11791721 Word Count: 22,578 29 June 2018

Abstract

The 21st century is playing host to a widening forum of public and private regulatory schemes and regime complexes. These are induced by combinations of state and non-state actors alike, and facilitate the emergence of what has been termed ‘polycentric governance’ (Abbott 2012; Abbott & Snidal 2009; Keohane & Victor 2011; Pattberg & Wideberg 2015). In turn, this has led to a complicating entanglement of laws and mechanisms by which states, firms, and other sub- and non-state actors must abide in order to adhere to standards of good governance and ethical conduct in a variety of issue areas. Scholars like Overdevest and Zeitlin (2014a; 2014b; 2015; 2016) have responded to this subsequent regime complexity, and the fragmentation it gives rise to, with an innovative theory; Experimentalist Governance Architecture (EGA). With this theory, they contend that such fragmentation can be harnessed to optimise its logistical, procedural and governance complexities. This has so far been instantiated by the European Union’s Timber Regulation (EUTR), but to unexpectedly varying degrees of success. This thesis seeks to address these unforeseen shortcomings, exploring the prescriptive weight of EGA to account for, and be applied to, the regulation and trade of timber products in the EU. Ultimately, it concludes by advocating both for a universal standard operating procedure to streamline the work of Competent Authorities (CAs), while also amending the legal mandate of Monitoring Organisations (MOs) to broaden their operational scope.

Keywords

regime complexity, polycentrism, fragmentation, experimentalist governance

Thesis supervisor: Dr. Philip Schleifer Second reader: Dr. Jonathan Zeitlin

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Abbreviations

CA - Competent Authority DDSs - Due Diligence Systems

EGA - Experimentalist Governance Architecture EC - European Commission

EUTR - European Union Timber Regulation

FLEGT - Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade FSC - Forest Stewardship Council

MO - Monitoring Organisation

PEFC - Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification VPA - Voluntary Partnership Agreement

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The political and economic landscape of the 21st century is now firmly embedded within a transnational framework. This involves complex issue areas like sustainable forestry and the international timber trade, which are the normative policy areas of focus for this research. Unilateral actors like the European Union (EU) and the United States, who account for a significant percentage of the global demand for timber products, and other unilateral actors accounting for its global supply, face new challenges in the globalised world relating to how equitable laws and regulations are implemented for harvesting, sourcing and trading in timber. These challenges can subsequently strain bilateral cooperation and coordination, especially in the presence of multilateral and private organisations with equally consequential agendas.

This has led to an increasingly widening forum of public and private regulatory schemes and regime complexes, induced by combinations of state and non-state actors, facilitating the emergence of what has been termed ‘polycentric governance’ (Abbott & Snidal 2009; Abbott 2012; Keohane & Victor 2011; Pattberg & Wideberg 2015). In turn, this has led to a complicating entanglement of laws and mechanisms by which states, firms, and other sub- and non-state actors must abide in order to adhere to standards of good governance and ethical conduct. This entanglement is otherwise referred to as fragmentation (Abbott 2012; Biermann et al 2009) and has the unfortunate side effect of inducing collective action problems between the actors concerned (Hale & Roger 2013). Issues of equity, fairness and regulatory efficiency are therefore at the centre of these transnational concerns, where states seek to ensure that codes of conduct are universal and adhered to by all parties, without threat of being undermined or having their sovereignty threatened.

In response to this regime complexity and the fragmentation it gives rise to, scholars like Overdevest and Zeitlin (2014a; 2014b; 2015; 2016) have shown that this fragmentation can instead be harnessed to optimise its concomitant logistical, procedural and governance complexities. Their innovative theory is Experimentalist Governance Architecture (EGA), and it forms the testable theoretical basis for this research.

Zooming in on sustainable forestry and the trade in timber, the authors point to the EU’s Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative as a prime example of EGA. FLEGT, which first took shape in 2003, consists of two

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complementary experimentalist governance mechanisms that respectively target the consumer and producer sides of the timber market. In the consumer EU market, this is the European Union Timber Regulation (EUTR); in the producer markets of several timber-exporting countries with whom the EU trades, this consists of Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs).

This thesis focuses solely on the demand side of this dynamic, the EUTR. It shows that despite the normative strength of EGA as a theory, and the promising start with which stakeholders in the EU have carried out timber governance and regulation in accordance with the theory, there have nevertheless been noticeable shortcomings in the implementation of experimentalist governance in the EU in the five years since the EUTR came into full effect in March 2013. This thesis seeks to understand why; showing that these issues have mostly manifested amongst ‘lower-level units’ or actors, including Competent Authorities (CAs) delegated to enforce the EUTR, Monitoring Organisations (MOs) assigned to provide optional Due Diligence Systems (DDSs) for the EU’s commercial timber retailers (referred to as Operators), and the Operators themselves. The ultimate goal is not to undermine the theoretical validity of EGA, but rather to strengthen it by diagnosing its practical shortcomings, and prescribing its own experimentalism to remedy them.

The following overarching research question and sub-questions will thus be the central points of departure from which all insights gained on EGA in the context of the EUTR will stem:

Research question and sub-questions

How effective has Experimentalist Governance Architecture been for the European Union’s Timber Regulation?

• What is the state of implementation of EGA?

• What explains variation in the implementation of EGA across jurisdictions? • How can EGA be improved to minimise the shortcomings of EUTR policy?

Theoretical and societal relevance

By fully realising an innovative theory like EGA, which has the potential to transcend conventional issues of political deadlock and collective action, its can achieve its full

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potential. Doing this may then normalise and codify it in practice, creating an institutional framework of political, business, and civil society actors cooperating in novel ways set forth by the theory. In light of the ever-pressing issue of anthropogenic climate change, the potential of EGA to effectively regulate the timber trade, and thereby contribute significantly to conserving the planet’s forestry so as to mitigate growing carbon dioxide emissions, is such that ensuring its optimisation is becoming increasingly urgent. To put this in perspective, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates that 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions result from deforestation alone; and that, alongside “fires, clear-cutting for agriculture, ranching and development [...] and degradation due to climate change” unsustainable logging for timber, which includes illegal logging, contributes to the loss of 18.7 million acres of forests around the globe every year (WWF 2018). Similarly, illegal logging disrupts the global legitimate timber trade by lowering prices of legally harvested timber, which undermines “law-abiding companies [while] depriving governments of revenues normally generated by duties and taxes” (WWF 2018).

The academic relevance for this research is best considered in the context of Pattberg and Widerberg’s (2015, 685) claim that the social sciences have “lagged behind” other academic disciplines in creating actionable policy on the basis of solid theory and empirical research. They state that the sole concern for the social sciences is organising “the co-evolution of societies and their surrounding environment, while balancing between effectiveness and equitable and fair governance solutions [...]” (2015, 685). An empirical evaluation of EGA in the context of the EUTR, so as to add to its theoretical weight and practical applicability, therefore seems academically relevant to substantiate this concern.

2 | Literature Review

Regime complexity

Understanding regime complexity requires first that it be treated as a symptom of a larger underlying phenomenon, namely that of global governance itself. Arts (2006, 178) provides an effective general typology of governance that distinguishes between ‘old’, ‘new’, and ‘all’ governance. This places governance on an evolutionary spectrum, ranging from its original state-dominated hierarchical form (old); to its “innovative [form of] private self regulation” (new); finally to its combination of both old and new forms of governance (2006, 178). The reason for this evolution, Bas highlights, is due to

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several mutual factors: (1) that politics itself has been ‘relocated’ from the traditional state level to “international and sub-national organisations”; (2) political spaces are no longer confined to the “territorial nation state” and this has necessarily led to a “de-territorialisation” of governance; (3) semi-public and private actors now have political power where they previously did not; and (4) failures of the underperforming state have led to its “delegitimisation”, therefore undermining its historical monopoly over governance (2006, 178).

Abbott and Snidal (2009, 44) make similar claims about the emergence of alternative forms of governance, indicating the 1980s as the critical time during which “non-state and public-private governance arrangements” instantiated the diffusion of political power and legitimacy, setting standards for “labour rights, human rights, and the environment”. Given the three decades of time over which this has occurred, it is fair to claim that power and governance have been sufficiently diffused across a wide range of actors and institutions.

The spread of power, legitimacy, and political spaces has therefore meant that actors, businesses and institutions involved in the activities and regulation of politics, commerce, security and the environment, now compete for primacy on an international and transnational level. This was evident as early as 1999 in an assessment made by Barnett and Finnemore (1999, 699-707) that, due to ‘bureaucratic culture’ and the technical expertise it engenders, international organisations such as branches of the United Nations naturally develop an internal pathology that places them at odds with their state-creators and the functional mandate that originally spurred their creation, thereby rendering non-state actors as autonomous agents.

Resulting from this global governance paradigm has been a divergent set of standards and expectations about how any given activity or issue area in politics, commerce, security, and the environment should be addressed and undertaken, and what constitutes fair and acceptable behavior by the actors involved. Speaking in the context of transnational climate change governance, Abbott (2012) refers to this as a “highly complex institutional environment [where] multiple organisations that have diverse memberships and operate at different scales [have created] fragmented or polycentric governance” (2012, 571).

Regime complexity has therefore been the result, if not the defining feature of, the gradual evolution of governance. Keohane and Victor (2011) define regime complexity as a “loosely coupled set of specific regimes”, where ‘regimes’ refers to a constituency

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of states, non-state civil society organisations, business enterprises, and media, whose divergent objectives and interests are codified into institutionalised practice (2011, 8). Where overarching and comprehensive policy efforts by a large cohort of actors fail to address the complex challenge of an issue area such as, for example, climate change, regime complexity is an effective alternative for such a challenge, due to the flexibility and adaptability provided by the diversity of actors and interests involved (2011, 7). They point out that such institutional regimes already exist in areas concerning “international emissions trading, innovation in strategies to manage forests, accommodation of border tax adjustments, and cooperation on technology policy”; additional areas also include general trade, human rights, intellectual property, security politics, and refugee politics (2011, 8; Alter & Meunier 2009, 13).

Most importantly, Keohane and Victor place their understanding of a regime complex in the centre of a continuum of regulatory regimes. On one end sits tightly organised, “fully integrated” efficient institutions, while on the other end sits disjointed “fragmented collections of institutions” with weakly connected regime elements (2011, 8). They maintain that a regime complex is a “loosely coupled variety” of the latter fragmented institutions, which occupy the center of this continuum and, notably, that they lack an overall structural architecture of governance. As a side-effect of this lacking structure, Black (2008) has noted that this has problematised how such fragmented regimes remain legitimate and accountable, highlighting the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) as one of many examples of social and environmental accreditation bodies that lack “clear existing structures such as courts, legislative committees, national auditors, ombudsmen [...] to which recourse can be made to render them accountable; they have no clear jurisdictional boundaries” (2008, 137-138). This shows that, to the extent that regime complexity offers the benefit of flexibility and adaptability on account of the multiplicity of non-state actors involved, there has been and remains to be the underlying issue of accountability and oversight. This is best expressed in terms of the principal-agent dynamic; where once there was a clear demarcation between the politically dominant state (principle) and its regulatory control over each issue area and the mandated roles of the actors involved in them (agents), the agents have now to a large extent assumed the role of principle, while continuing their pre-existing roles as agents. This has effectively undermined the regulatory power of the state, leaving a distinct absence of oversight and therefore also legitimacy of the agents’ roles.

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Concerning the issue area of forest management and the global trade in timber, the currently existing regime complex consists of public and state-led initiatives such as the European Union’s Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) programme, The United States’ 2008 Lacey Act amendment officially banning the import of illegally sourced timber, the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD); public-private partnership networks such as the FSC, the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), and the Tropical Forest Alliance 2020; and private businesses implementing corporate zero-deforestation initiatives1. These represent a sample of the international forest regime. The current state of this international regime, with its dizzying array of actors, institutions, and regulations, is therefore no exception to Black’s observations concerning lacking accountability and legitimacy, as the following section of this chapter will outline in further detail.

State of the contemporary international forest regime

With an understanding of regime complexity in the context of the evolution of governance established, what follows is a description and evaluation of the current global forest regime complex.

The most prominent failures and setbacks of the international forest regime over the course of its existence leading up to the early 2000s have stemmed from an emphasis and over-reliance on multilateral, legally-binding agreements at the inter-governmental level (Bass & Guéneau 2005, 2-6). Bass and Guéneau provide an extensive dissection of the frequency and scope of pre-existing intergovernmental institutions and agreements concerning forest management.

Regarding institutions, these include in 1995 the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) establishing the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests (IPF) to draw up multilateral proposals, as well as the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF) to oversee their implementation. In 2000, the IFF in turn established the International Arrangement on Forests (IAF) before being succeeded by the United

1_{Amongst which include some of the largest global corporations such as Disney, HSBC, McDonalds,}

Nestlé, and Unilever http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/7-companies-working-to-end-deforestation/. See also: https://www.fastcompany.com/40523599/how-real-are-companies-promises-to-stop-deforestation

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Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF). The Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF) was also established to serve as a central forum through which all international organisations involved in forest governance-- including the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), and the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO)-- could cooperate (Bass & Guéneau 2005, 3). Tarasofsky (1999, 9) also highlights that the Global Environment Facility (GEF) has an “operational programme” relating to forests.

Regarding the legally-binding agreements tackling and/or including forestry as a key issue area, these include: (1) the three branches of the Rio convention, namely the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the United Nations Framework to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD); (2) the International Tropical Timber Agreement (ITTA); (3) the FAO Committee on Forestry; (4) the UNESCO World Heritage Convention; (5) the CITES convention; and (6) the International Labour Organisation (ILO) (Bass & Guéneau 2005, 3). In addition to these legally binding instruments, Giessen (2013, 62) lists five UN-led non-legally binding agreements. Notably, Bas and Guéneau claim that this collective of agreements has contributed to the construction of a fragmented and complex institutional architecture. Added to these, one must next consider the number of private businesses, corporate initiatives, regional (municipal) governments, and NGOs who have adopted sustainable and ethical forestry as part of their agenda or annual framework goals.

Unsurprisingly then, this is a head spinning regime complex. One is immediately aware of the regulatory overlap and lack of practical application bound to stem from such a system. The aim here in highlighting the frequency of institutions is not to expect that one can logically trace how they diverge normatively and in practice, but rather to emphasise the exact opposite; it is unclear how or why such a large consortium of actors could effectively regulate the conservation and trade of the world’s forests. Indeed, Bas and Guéneau explicitly refer to the “bogging down of intergovernmental negotiation processes” as one of several reasons spurring their support for market-driven approaches to forest governance instead (Bass & Guéneau 2005, 2). Speaking in reference to the FAO, Tarasofsky (1999, 8) asserts that it faces the challenge of defining “its niche and role in relation to other international instruments and institutions relating to forests”. This can apply to most, if not all, of the above-mentioned institutions. At the

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core of these institutions and their agendas, issues of equity, fairness, and priorities have been especially problematic. A North-South division of interests concerning the maintenance and exploitation of forests-- as both economic resource and vulnerable ecosystem-- has been a central issue hampering unanimity amongst all parties (Bass & Guéneau 2005, 2).

The issue of compatibility and translatability on the global level is therefore especially poignant when considering a point made by Tarasofsky regarding the relative successes, by contrast, of the “Central American Process” under the Central American Forest Convention (Tarasofsky 1999, 9). Two factors upon which these successes have hinged are especially noteworthy: (1) that the countries in the region “are sufficiently like-minded in their approach to forest management, which involves using incentive measures [...]”; and (2) that the Central American process has prioritised civil society involvement (Tarasofsky 1999, 9). The result of this has been that the region has more effectively “implement[ed] global norms in a regionally-specific manner”. Bass and Guéneau (2005, 4) echo this, citing a tangible absence of NGO engagement and a “lack of government openness to civil society representatives” as a contributing factor to the ineffectiveness of global forest governance. These seem to strengthen the case that stronger regional cooperation between states is more effective in meeting the ambitious and often impractical goals set at the intergovernmental, multilateral level, and without deviating from those goals.

As we will see, the European Union’s Timber Regulation (EUTR) continues this trend. It focuses on stronger cooperation between all actors across the EU’s timber supply line at the local and regional level, setting strong business standards and exclusive market access to incentivise foreign trade partners to ensure their timber exports have been legally harvested. Civil society partners across the EU are encouraged and expected to monitor how incoming timber is processed, and whether EUTR standards have been met. These features constitute important aspects of what has increasingly been recognised in normative terms by Sabel & Zeitlin (2007; 2010; 2011) and Overdevest & Zeitlin (2014a; 2014b; 2015; 2016) as ‘experimentalism’ or ‘experimentalist governance architecture’.

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3 | Theoretical Framework

Experimentalist Governance Architecture

Amidst the ubiquitous regulatory overload and overlap at the intergovernmental level, the unique supranational structure of the European Union has given rise to an organic form of governance. Experimentalist Governance Architecture (EGA) has shown significant promise in its ability to effectively delegate the regulation and governance of an overarching framework goal amongst the actors involved in achieving it.

EGA is a “multi-level architecture” style of governance consisting of four stages (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2014b, 6). First, public and private stakeholders-- from government representatives, to small and large business owners, to local community councils-- cooperate in tackling a problematic issue area like sustainable forestry and the timber trade. These actors jointly create the overarching objectives to be achieved in this issue area, as well as the “metrics for gauging their achievement”. Second, coalitions of local actors are assigned greater responsibility and autonomy to achieve these goals in the most contextually appropriate way. These local actors can range from “firms or territorial authorities [including] member state authorities in the EU” (Sabel & Zeitlin 2011, 3). Third, in return for this autonomy, these local actors must “report regularly on their performance and participate in a peer review” to compare their results with the results of other coalitions of local actors; any poor performers are then expected to make improvements by adopting the strategies of their better performing peers. Lastly, the overarching “goals, metrics, and decision-making procedures” of the first stage are continuously updated, based on findings yielded from the third stage, and the entire cycle then repeats in a process referred to as ‘recursive learning’ (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2014a, 25; 2014b, 6).

Figure 1 visualises these four stages of experimentalist governance in a clock-wise chronology (Zeitlin PPLE 2016):

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Figure 1: Experimentalist Governance Architecture

As far as 2007, Sabel and Zeitlin had traced the evolution of the EU’s governance structure, and identified what had been an emerging pattern of governance throughout its institutions. At the core of this was that the EU’s member states engaged in “deliberative decision making”, whereby each member’s interests were represented and discursively weighed against the interests of their peers, until a satisfying compromise or solution could be reached (Sabel & Zeitlin 2007, 5). The term ‘deliberative’ is central to the notion of experimentalism here, as it is understood to mean “the use of argument to disentrench settled practices and open for reconsideration the definitions of group, institutional, and even national interest associated with them” (Sabel & Zeitlin 2011, 4). This was enabled by the broad range of agents-- from “civil servants, scientific experts [to] representatives of interest groups”-- engaging in epistemic discourse and creating expert opinion on regulation, which then works its way to the Commission itself (Sabel & Zeitlin 2007, 5). According to Sabel and Zeitlin, this pattern began to manifest in the 1980s through to 2000, and in three distinct domains: (1) the “re-regulation of privatised network infrastructure”; (2) “public health and safety”; and (3) “social solidarity”, all of which pertain to areas ranging from telecommunications to pension programmes, and

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environmental protection to citizens rights, amongst others (Sabel & Zeitlin 2007, 3; 12). As a result, EGA is also malleable, having taken many forms such as “networked agencies, councils of national regulators, open methods of coordination, and operational cooperation among front-line officials” (Sabel & Zeitlin 2011, 5). Additionally, experimentalist governance is most likely to arise in conditions where policy makers have prior “strategic uncertainty” on how best to achieve a certain goal, and where the policy makers themselves exist within a “multi-polar or polyarchic distribution of power” (Sabel & Zeitlin 2007, 13).

With the broad range of interests represented by the EU’s ever-expanding membership, it has been necessarily crucial that a discursive, deliberative format emerged for those interests to be as equally and democratically represented as possible; the natural construction of EGA is therefore fitting here. Ultimately, this historical backdrop has given rise to the extensive process outlined above that currently governs the EU’s Timber Regulation, and by extension its contribution to the conservation and management of domestic and global forestry.

Regime Complexity and Experimentalist Governance, a way forward?

To fully grasp the importance of EGA, it is appropriate to first place it in the modern context of fragmentation, regime complexity, and polycentric governance.

Biermann et al (2009, 15) perceive global governance architectures, which they define as “the overarching system[s] of public and private institutions [...] active in a given issue area of world politics”, to be highly fragmented. Specifically, they take this fragmentation to mean that policy domains are plagued by “a patchwork of international institutions that are different in their character (organisations, regimes, and implicit norms), their constituencies (public and private), their spatial scope (from bilateral to global), and their subject matter (from specific policy fields to universal concerns)”. Given the diversity of such organisations, implicit norms, and the actors involved, it is easy to see how the modern regulatory landscape is now able to monitor and account for intricate misconducts that would have previously gone unnoticed. On the other hand however, these same organisations and the ‘patchwork’ of institutions they have given rise to now risk creating new loopholes for actors to take advantage of. This is especially evident in the case of ‘forum shopping’, where in this case businesses involved in the purchase and manufacture of timber products may take advantage of clear differences between certification schemes like the FSC, the Sustainable Forestry

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Initiative (SFI), or the PEFC, so as to subscribe to the scheme with the least stringent requirements, thereby gaining an advantage over their competitors (Abbott 2012, 582).

As a prime example of this patchwork, Abbott and Snidal (2009, 44-45) highlight how “firms and industry associations”, “NGOs [promoting] standards for voluntary adoption by firms”, and “multi-stakeholder organisations [...] that promulgate and implement codes”, constitute a transnational set of institutions engaged in varying levels of “regulatory standard-setting” schemes (RSS), where RSS is a set of voluntarily agreed norms to regulate actors’ behaviour.

Writing in this same conceptual space, Abbott (2012, 572-573) states that transnational climate change governance is a fragmented realm constituted by polycentric governance and regime complexity, where polycentrism refers explicitly to “decision making and organization at different scales”. Abbott then cites literature on the theory stating that polycentrism can mobilise small-scale local groups to “organise collective action to deal with common pool resources and other social dilemmas” (Abbott 2012, 573). Here one can already see how sustainable forestry and the trade in timber fits within this polycentric narrative and regime complexity scope; it involves private regulatory schemes like the FSC, PEFC, and SFI; firms and businesses subscribing to and being regulated by these schemes; and unilateral states and multilateral organisations like the WTO all interacting and overlapping in the regulation of timber products around the world.

It is here where Overdevest and Zeitlin (2014; 2015; 2016) argue for their specific, focused type of governance architecture. This experimentalist governance emphasises constant improvement through a “recursive process of provisional goal setting and revision based on learning from comparison of alternative approaches” (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2014b, 25). They state that FLEGT and its subsidiary EUTR initiative are prototypical cases of “a transnational experimentalist regime for forest sector governance” (2014a, 39). It seems fair to logically deduce from this that the experimentalist character of FLEGT necessarily also means that its core components, the supply-side VPAs and the demand-side EUTR, consist of experimentalist governance architecture (EGA). This is the central implicit assumption justifying this thesis’ exploration of the EUTR as an instantiation of EGA. The following section will further justify this assumption by exploring how EUTR fulfills EGA criteria.

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FLEGT, EUTR, and experimentalist features

The experimentalist FLEGT initiative was first conceptualised by the European Commission (EC) in 2003 to stop illegally harvested timber entering the EU market (Jonsson et al 2015, 6). It consists both of VPAs with timber-exporting countries, and the EUTR in the EU for importers and retailers.

The EUTR was created by the EC in 2010 and officially enforced in 2013. It mandates that all timber importers, intermittent custodians, and retailers across the EU placing timber products on the market for the first time-- all universally referred to by the EC as ‘operators’-- prove that their timber was legally sourced and harvested (Jonsson et al 2015, 7). Operators must do this by exercising due-diligence, which includes verifying the timber’s “country of harvest, species, details of the supplier, information on compliance with national legislation, undertaking a risk assessment, and creating and implementing a risk mitigation plan” (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2015, 148).

As Overdevest and Zeitlin show, operators can prove due diligence either through (1) “possession of a FLEGT VPA licence”; (2) their own in-house due diligence systems (DDSs), which must include “risk assessment, risk mitigation, and regular evaluation procedures”; or (3) consulting the services of EC-accredited “third-party monitoring organisations” (MOs)2 who construct and can provide due diligence systems (DDSs) to operators seeking to use them (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2015, 148-149). EU member states and their respective ‘Competent Authorities’ (CAs), which oversee and regulate the activity of MOs and operators, must enforce “penalties on companies contravening [the EUTR]” (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2015, 149). MOs themselves are audited every two years by the EC, and civil society organisations are “expected to play a watch dog role” by reporting any observable issues found with MOs to CAs, which the EUTR obliges CAs to follow up (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2015, 149). CAs can be either federal ministries or licensed national authorities3. Notably, at the time of writing, Overdevest and Zeitlin indicated here that the EC was initiating a dialogue exchange with each of the CAs to ensure that EUTR implementation was as homogenous as possible. This already suggests that issues of implementation and divergences across member states thereof have been significant enough to warrant closer commission oversight.

2_{A list of every Monitoring Organisation can be found here:}

http://ec.europa.eu/environment/forests/pdf/List_of_recognised_MOs.pdf

3_{A list of every EU member states’ respective Competent Authority can be found here:}

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Moreover, the EC “is obliged to produce regular progress reports on the operation of [the EUTR]”; information of this progress is itself provided to the EC by the member states, and the EC then makes any necessary amendments to the EUTR every five years to continuously improve upon it (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2015, 149).

Overdevest and Zeitlin also point out that the EU has sought to cooperate with private industry federations like the European Timber Trade Federation (ETTF), and incorporate their operations to be EUTR-compatible (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2015, 150). This has involved the ETTF ensuring that private forest certification schemes like the FSC are compatible with the EUTR, which the FSC and others have since addressed to ensure compatibility (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2015, 150). The reason for the EU’s private industry cooperation is because operators have so far predominantly chosen to use these private third-party certification schemes to verify their supply chains and demonstrate due diligence, rather than using the DDSs provided by MOs (Overdevest and Zeitlin 2016, 13). The reason for this in turn being that MO DDSs are more costly, and that operators are disincentivised to use MO DDSs, due simply to the fact that MOs are obliged to report any operators’ due diligence failures to their respective CAs, which operators naturally want to avoid (Overdevest and Zeitlin 2016, 13).

In summary, the EUTR is a crucial demand-side component of the EU’s experimentalist FLEGT initiative. The EUTR mandates all timber operators in the EU to provide verified proof of due diligence. The EC delegates implementation of the EUTR to the Competent Authorities (CAs) of each member state. Operators can demonstrate due diligence in one of the three previously-listed ways, but have mostly chosen to employ a fourth option, as seen in the frequency of operators using private third-party certification schemes like the FSC to demonstrate due diligence. EC-accredited Monitoring Organisations (MOs) are tasked with monitoring and evaluating the performance only of operators that have chosen to consult their services for due diligence. MOs in turn are, and can be, overseen and regulated both by the federal CAs of their respective member state of operation as well as other member states, and are audited by the EC every two years. Most importantly, the purported effect of the EUTR is that it is a ‘penalty default mechanism’. This means foreign timber exporters abroad have a financial incentive to subscribe to the EU’s FLEGT initiative to put them on a path towards due diligence verification, in order to ensure their timber is traceable and legitimate. Otherwise, the EU’s operators on the demand side are prohibited from importing their timber (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2015, 150-151).

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As a result, the EUTR legislation appears to embody each of the four-stages of experimentalist governance architecture; it galvanises private-public cooperation in establishing and monitoring its overarching framework goals; it emphasises local autonomy-- as operators as private actors can flexibly choose to employ their own due diligence systems or consult the services of MOs or otherwise, and civil society is expected to monitor MO effectiveness for any failures4--; operators’ making use of a MO’s DDSs are regularly monitored and reviewed by those MOs, who in turn are audited and reviewed by CAs, and failing operators are expected to course-correct; and lastly, the EUTR itself is reviewed every five years by the EC in light of findings yielded from member states on behalf of their respective CAs. The EUTR therefore constitutes a vital part of the EU’s experimentalist regime due to its emphasis on engaging broad arrays of public and private stakeholders to assist in creating both the framework goals to be achieved, and the metrics for gauging that achievement (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2014b, 7-8). Importantly, metrics for progress specifically refer here to “continuous monitoring and regular review of decentralised implementation by

countries and firms, underpinned by a penalty default mechanism” (Overdevest &

Zeitlin 2014b, 8). Namely, countries-- representing the public sector-- and firms-- representing the private sector-- should jointly participate in EUTR implementation, in accordance with EGA.

Despite the comprehensive prescriptive assertions of experimentalist governance, it is argued here that joint (public-private) overview and construction of the overarching framework goals for the EUTR-- as prescribed in stage one of experimentalist architecture-- is insufficient. Rather, stronger emphasis should also be placed on stage three; on joint governance in the implementation of the EUTR and active monitoring thereof, where this has thus far only been the domain of public actors, namely the CAs. This is argued because of the seemingly absent incentive structure or guiding mechanism in place to motivate autonomous private operators both to act in accordance with the overarching framework goals, and engage in peer review5. As quoted above,

4_{Which, as Overdevest and Zeitlin highlight, Greenpeace has already done, when they raised}

“high-profile public complaints about the export to Europe of illegally logged wood from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, and the Brazilian Amazon” (Overdevest and Zeitlin 2016, 13).

5_{This is implicit in the fact that a majority of operators have chosen to verify their timber supply chains}

through the certification services provided by third-party schemes such as the FSC, as mentioned on P.16. Despite the fact that these schemes have come under closer public oversight thanks to EGA-- resulting in them revising their schemes for compatibility-- this still does not account for the marginalising effect incurred upon EC-accredited MOs. This then begs the question: outside of the optional services they

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the metrics for progress delegate the monitoring and reviewing to both the public sector (countries) and the private sector (firms). However the public government actors (CAs) to whom local, or private, actors (operators and MOs) must report on their progress in stage three of EGA do not appear to be cooperating with MOs enough to facilitate performance peer review between operators, as the theory would suggest. Therefore, the joint governance edict of EGA appears to have only gone so far as to construct the framework goals of the EUTR. Private MO actors appear to be under-represented and under-utilised in the actual monitoring and reporting process of a wider pool of operators constructing due diligence systems. This represents an interesting puzzle and point of empirical research. For clarity, the EGA theory states that better governance of a complex multilateral issue area could be achieved if the following practices are codified as institutionalised governance:

1. public-private (joint) cooperation to establish broad framework goals; 2. greater local and private autonomy to achieve those goals;

3. joint oversight and monitoring of local actors’ performance through peer-review, with poor performers making corrections;

4. and regular monitoring of whether the overarching goals are being met, based on results from local actors’ performance.

The identified puzzle is that while each of these four experimentalist features are legally reflected in the EUTR, the regulation in practice has been unevenly implemented. As alluded to previously, this uneven implementation appears to be most pronounced in stage three of the experimentalist chronology across several domains, where cooperation between and reporting by ‘lower-level units’, or joint ‘public, private, hybrid’ actors, is unclear and irregular.

Exploring inconsistent translations of stage III EGA in the EUTR

Overdevest and Zeitlin highlight that a number of member states have faced timber trade regulation issues within the EU that stem from procedural difficulties and slow implementation (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2016, 14-15). This has led to an uneven implementation of the EUTR, which in turn has resulted in “illegal timber [still

provide, are MOs, as private sector constituents of joint governance and monitors of the EUTR’s framework goals, being engaged enough in a way that fully satisfies EGA?

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entering] the EU market, which potential partner countries like Indonesia have “cited as an argument against complying with [the EU’s] legality certification and export licensing” requirements (2016, 15).

Overdevest and Zeitlin state that this was eventually resolved when the European Commission initiated “EU pilot dialogues and infringement proceedings” (2016, 15). This encouraged member states’ respective CAs to cooperate in an “informal enforcement network” to resolve discrepancies in their capacities to enforce EUTR. However, these pilot dialogues appear to have been a superficial remedy, in that they failed to address underlying structural issues of the experimentalist governance process, and do not reflect lower level peer review and course corrective action. There is also an absence of empirical data here to substantiate the claim that this uneven implementation issue was fully resolved.

The effects of this slow implementation-- and the underlying structural issues of EGA in addressing this-- appear to have continued; as recently as November 2017, a Dutch timber firm was found to be guilty of breaching the EUTR by illegally selling Burmese teak wood in the EU without having conducted proper due diligence6 (EIA 2017). The same EIA article lists an additional Dutch company to be under investigation by the Dutch authorities, as well as that a further “17 companies7 have been found guilty of breaching the EUTR when placing Burmese teak [on the market]”. Given that such cases persist, with firms breaching their EUTR due diligence commitments, intentionally or otherwise, this suggests that certain aspects of the EUTR’s instantiation of EGA have not been fully realised, and thus raises a clear puzzle in the context of the theory, further raising areas of potential empirical investigation.

For example, where local actors such as the private Dutch timber operators mentioned above clearly have autonomy, and are monitored by civil society actors like the EIA, there seems in these specific cases to be an absence of stricter public-private (joint) oversight8 of EUTR-compliant due diligence. In the Dutch case, this appears to have been due to an absence of Monitoring Organisation (MO) involvement; of the eight possible MOs throughout the EU with the jurisdictional coverage over Dutch timber operators, none of these appeared to be actively engaged either in coordinating with CAs in due diligence oversight, or facilitating peer review; or they did so

6_{For the full report, see:}

https://eia-international.org/major-dutch-timber-company-found-breach-european-timber-regulation

7_{Presumably across the EU; this is unspecified in the article report.}

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insufficiently. The EIA report demonstrates that the Dutch CA (Nederlands Voedsel- en Warenautoriteit) was notified of the poor-performing operators by the EIA itself, thus representing the civil society branch of the EGA chronology’s lower level public sector, and not the private or hybrid sector, which could have been represented by any of the eight potential MOs. Nor was there any traceable sign of joint oversight of comparative peer review between the noncompliant Dutch operators and their better performing peers in lieu of the former’s EUTR non-compliance, followed by corrective action. Instead, the poor performers were threatened with a financial penalty by the Dutch CA for any continued noncompliance (EIA 2017). Though seemingly effective in retrospect-- as most threats of financial penalty tend to be-- this unfortunately is not a full reflection of experimentalist governance.

In his article for the Association for Environmental Law, Douma (2017) highlights another example of this happening with a different Dutch operator importing timber from Cameroon. In this case, there was a similar absence of MO involvement, with the CA issuing similar financial penalties with little trace of joint oversight or peer review having occurred (Douma 2017). This is in direct contradiction to the claims made by Overdevest and Zeitlin (2016, 15) that countries (CAs) and firms (MOs & Operators)--representing the public and private sectors respectively-- continuously monitor, review, and thereby jointly govern, the success of the EUTR’s implementation. These examples are clearly not cases of course corrective action based on peer-review leading to recursive learning, and as a result they threaten to undermine the normative claims made by Overdevest and Zeitlin (2015) as to the effectiveness of the EUTR and its experimentalist features:

“The joint governance systems created to oversee these agreements institutionalize key experimentalist principles, including regular review and revision of both the underlying legality standards and the assurance system designed to achieve them through recursive learning by monitoring of implementation experience.” (Overdevest and Zeitlin 2014a, 39; 2015, 151)

Given the importance placed on the laurels of recursive learning offered by EGA, it seems striking that the responsibility of “recursive learning by monitoring of implementation experience” appears to have not been fully realised throughout the EU.

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Noting a stage I translation error of EGA in the EUTR

Concerning an additional identified issue that appears to stem in this case from stage one of the EUTR’s instantiation of EGA; in yet another Dutch example also in 2017, the Amsterdam District Court had officially ruled that the Dutch CA had “failed to enforce the EUTR without a proper reason in a number of cases where companies had imported timber from Brazil, without abiding by the EUTR due diligence requirements” (Douma 2017).

In addition then to the apparent stage III absence of MOs jointly collaborating with CAs in monitoring, reporting on, and improving the due diligence requirements of operators, the stage I case highlights that CAs seem to lack a comprehensive, EU-wide, standard operating procedure that accounts for several important factors: (1) their methodology for conducting checks on operators; (2) metrics for measuring and penalising operator noncompliance; and (3) their experimentalist adherence to peer review so as to improve the future ability of noncompliant operators to demonstrate due diligence and be EUTR-compliant.

These instances motivate a two-part investigation into the factors that have, and may continue to, problematise universal experimentalist implementation of EUTR-compliant due diligence across member states. EUTR implementation is subsequently the key dependent variable. The main factors contributing to its (un)successful implementation are verified due diligence; active MO participation in monitoring and improving the due diligence of operators outside their clientele; performance peer review; and universal CA standard operating procedures. The justification for EUTR implementation being the dependent variable hinges on its overarching centrality to the EU’s experimentalist forest governance regime. It is both the European Commission‘s primary regulation to universally verify commercial timber retailers across the EU, as well as the real-world policy and public governance phenomenon putting experimentalist governance, as a theory, into practice. As a result, its implementation relies on certifiable due diligence by operators. This in turn is dependent upon assigning MOs greater responsibility to proactively and retrospectively prompt peer review between operators in light of CAs having identified noncompliant operators, such that they facilitate the ability of CAs to ensure operators are EUTR-compliant. Meanwhile, in addition to their functions of actively auditing MOs, CA inspection of operators should be conducted under the

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auspices of a strict, comprehensive, and EU-wide intelligible standard operating procedure, while also ensuring that mandatory peer review between operators takes place.

Addressing EUTR gaps and formulating hypotheses

The gaps identified in the EUTR’s progress and the missing links in its instantiation of EGA are two-fold.

First, the Dutch example shows that there is the risk of confusion amongst CAs on how best to interpret and implement the EUTR. This calls for a standardised operating procedure applicable to all CAs across the EU that incorporates: (1) an identical methodology for conducting checks on operators; (2) identical metrics for measuring and penalising operator noncompliance; and (3) jointly prompting peer review with MOs by sharing the successful due diligence methods of compliant operators with noncompliant operators.

Second, there appears to be a significant exclusion of MOs as proactive monitors; instead, their central EC-mandate, as explicitly stated in sections (a) to (c) of paragraph 1 in Article 8 of the EUTR regulation, is only the optional provision of due diligence services (DDS) to operators requesting it i.e. “grant[ing] operators the right to use it” (European Commission 2010, 28). MOs are then only required to monitor those operators who have chosen to consult their DDSs; there is no wider mandate given to MOs to monitor the due diligence of operators outside their clientele, regardless of their due diligence type. Since it has also been noted that operators have primarily chosen either to consult the services of private third-party certification schemes (non-MO schemes) or implement their own due diligence systems, MOs also seem to be largely excluded from the EUTR’s experimentalist governance process altogether, as their primary function to monitor only those operators employing MO DDSs is also undermined. It is therefore hypothesised that the EUTR would be more successfully implemented if operators are monitored for due diligence by both MOs and CAs, with the legal authority mandate remaining strictly with CAs.

This means that stage III of EGA requires an explicit two-tiered joint oversight mechanism. Specifically, the regulatory power and capacity of delegated oversight would be better shared between MOs and CAs, and this should be made clear to operators. In light of CAs having conducted first-tier checks of operators, followed by

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the necessary issuing of penalties, MOs should then serve as a second-tier of due diligence oversight via course corrective peer review to improve the performance of non-compliant operators. Figure 2 provides an overview of the hypothesised requirements for a more successful implementation of the EUTR. These theoretical points of enquiry thus give rise to the following falsifiable hypotheses to be tested:

• H1: The EUTR’s Experimentalist Governance Architecture cannot be fully realised without two-tiered joint oversight in its third experimentalist stage (Monitoring Organisation and Competent Authority engagement).

• H2: Competent Authorities throughout the EU with divergent interpretations of the EUTR are more likely to contribute to its uneven implementation.

The central argument being tested here is whether or not Experimentalist Governance Architecture, as defined by Overdevest and Zeitlin, has been an effective social science theory with the prescriptive weight to be actionably applied in the EU. This is because stages two and four of the theory seem to have translated well in practice, showing that its success or full realisation should not be undermined by what appear to be its weaker links, stage three and, to a lesser degree, stage one. The goal of this research is ultimately to corroborate or improve upon the theory’s wider applicability, through inductive reasoning stemming from a case study of the EU timber market.

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Figure 2: Improved EUTR implementation via MO engagement

4 | Research Design Objective overview

As stated in the theoretical framework, the theoretical puzzles of EGA identified in the EUTR and its implementation thus far relate specifically to stage three (III), and to a lesser degree stage one (I) of EGA, thus creating a two-part research objective:

(1) The framework goals of the EUTR and the metrics for gauging their achievement seem to be too open to interpretation, to the extent that the public actors (CAs) responsible for their assessment in their respective member states-- as highlighted by the Dutch CA case-- have in the past failed to enforce it;

(2) MOs, as publicly recognised (EC-accredited) private actors, appear to be under-utilised as sources of potential due diligence oversight and improvement. Their assigned mandate extends only to operators who have chosen to adopt and use their DDSs.

EUTR Implementation

Operators demonstrate due

diligence

Operators and MOs perform peer review

CAs (public) conduct checks using a Standard Operating Procedure Retrospective MO (private) oversight of noncompliant operators via peer

review

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Considering the emphasis placed in the first and second EGA stages on public and private cooperation--i.e. joint governance--, there seems to be no reason why the same joint governance cannot be applied in the third stage without having to risk compromising the autonomy of operators or the ‘private’ business interests of MOs. Moreover, it seems only beneficial if operators have the added incentive of ensuring their DDSs are EUTR-compliant by cooperating with MOs that carry out what is envisaged as retrospective or ‘second-tier’ due diligence peer review. Similarly, MOs have an added incentive of reaching a wider potential clientele base through the increased engagement that a two-tiered joint oversight mechanism would offer.

For clarity, it is argued that the public oversight capacity of CAs can and should be extended to the EC-accredited MOs, thereby widening the latter’s operational scope and providing a ‘two-tiered’ system of checking for due diligence that will better reflect the ‘joint oversight’ characteristic of EGA. However it should be emphasised that the extended capacity suggested here should not be confused with assigning MOs the same legal authority as CAs to enforce penalties upon noncompliant operators, as this would represent a blatant conflict of interests for MOs as private businesses. Rather, the extent of increasing an MO’s mandate should be such that it proactively engages with operators outside its clientele base to conduct retrospective due diligence assessments, and where appropriate prompt the sharing of best due diligence practices and methodologies between operators. This can contribute to both strengthening the EGA theory and ensuring that it achieves its full practical application in the form of the EUTR.

Units of analysis

The universe of cases for this investigation is confined to the European Union.

Part one will initiate the case study by analysing CA implementation of the EUTR across the EU. It is expected that an inductive case study analysis of the EUTR, as a manifestation of experimentalist governance, will offer a richer understanding of why specific stages of the EGA chronology do not become fully translated in practice.

Part two of the case study will analyse MO-engagement levels both more generally in cases where MOs provide DDSs to operators, and in specific cases where operators have been found to be noncompliant with the EUTR in demonstrating due diligence.

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Data and method

Part one of this study will analyse secondary data on CAs throughout the EU, as well as the EUTR legislation itself. This includes analysing the EUTR against publicly available reports, specifically obligatory biennial9 performance reports submitted by CAs to the European Commission. These will be closely compared to check for divergences in implementation resulting from CA activity. A particular focus of the case study will be process tracing of the data in order to identify specific points where CAs misinterpreted or diverged in their implementation the EUTR to the extent that this caused operator noncompliance, thereby allowing unverified timber to enter the EU. Particular attention will be paid to how CAs throughout the EU implemented the EUTR in terms of the hypothesised criteria listed for a comprehensive standard operating procedure i.e. comparing their performance in terms of: (1) methodology for conducting checks on operators; (2) metrics for measuring and penalising operator noncompliance; and (3) use of peer review between operators. This will be done to understand the extent to which CAs have lived up to the experimentalist features of the EUTR. This analysis uses inductive reasoning, where insights gained from this case study can be inferred across wider generalisable cases of experimentalist governance.

Part two of this analysis employs both primary and secondary data. Primary data has been sourced by conducting semi-structured, process-focused interviews with relevant representatives from a sample of three MOs out of the thirteen total currently in commission. Secondary data on MO activity-- measured by both the number of instances operators consulted them for due diligence services, and the number of instances CAs engaged them to facilitate peer review between operators-- will also be sourced from the biennial reports, and where applicable from MO websites and publicly available documentation contained therein, as well as interview response data, respectively.

The method being employed is qualitative. This is based on the nature of the policy and social science theory under study. Given that this thesis seeks to address and test the inductive claims of a prescriptive social science theory of a real world regulatory phenomenon, the research method required to address and solve irregularities and incoherencies found in the phenomenon necessitates a qualitative approach. This

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includes the use of interviews to gain first-hand insight from the actors involved in the enforcement of the regulation, which can be used to triangulate against and corroborate existing data gained from policy assessments and reviews. Additionally, the EUTR is still relatively recent, having only been in force for five years. This means the level of statistical data with which to conduct quantitative analyses is still in its infancy. Similarly, a quantitative approach may be better suited for a political economy analysis of the EUTR and its success in the context of sustainable forestry policy and domestic economic growth. A 2016 European Commission evaluation report of the EUTR made similar observations, stating: “A quantitative evaluation of the effectiveness of the EUTR is challenging due to the clandestine nature of the illegal activities and the absence of precise data on their volume and cost” (European Commission 2016b, 4).

It is also expected that this qualitative method will result in a mixture of iterative knowledge production and serendipity, where the observed data will inevitably reinform assumptions about EGA as a theory, and where accidental and unanticipated findings will influence the underlying assumptions about EUTR functioning in the context of EGA.

Strategies used to identify interviewees; confidentiality and anonymity

The interviewees were identified by consulting a publicly available document published online by the European Commission10_{, which outlines every accredited MO and the}

member states they operate in. The interviewees are the respective representatives of these organisations, and the three interviews were conducted via telephone. Each interview lasted between fifteen to thirty minutes, and consisted of semi-structured questions that focused on the interviewee’s perspective as an actor representing an MO within a wider governance framework, pertaining to the following:

- The number of operators the MO provides due diligence services to;

- The contact and cooperation between the MO and the respective CA of that member state in checking operators' due diligence;

- The interviewees’ perceptions of the EUTR and its effectiveness;

- The interviewees’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the respective CA in checking operators' due diligence.

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Out of respect for the respondents’ privacy, and the sensitive nature of potential conflicts of interest that may arise from incorporating their responses as private business representatives, the respondents and their positions in their organisations have not been revealed, and their inputs will be anonymously incorporated into the analysis. They will therefore be referred to as Respondents A, B, and C.

Validity, Reliability, and Replicability

This research project is testing for the success of the EUTR as a practical instantiation of the EGA theory, over the five years of its operation thus far. The variables influencing this outcome are CA universality of approach, MO engagement levels, and the extent to which these correlate to successful cases of operators demonstrating due diligence. Given the experimentalist backdrop and features of EUTR, this provides appropriate construct validity, as it is an applicable real-world public policy phenomenon that instantiates, and therefore tests, the theoretical applicability of EGA.

Given that this thesis is conducting a EU-wide case study analysis, this provides greater external validity for the findings. This is because the data under analysis pertains to a larger sample of nations, involving up to twenty-eight EU member states, all of which are legally bound by the EUTR’s directives. Therefore, findings derived from this case that concern the functioning and applicability of EGA as a theory in the real world, are likely to have greater generalisability to additional real-world policy phenomena that have been constructed along experimentalist architecture lines. This study is however threatened by low internal validity, given that the causes for successful EUTR implementation may in-fact differ from the causes hypothesised in this study, and instead may be attributable to external factors that have not yet been identified by virtue either of their apparent ambiguity, or the relative infancy of the EUTR itself.

This study both benefits and suffers from replicability. On the one hand, the publicly available information for secondary data analysis can easily be retrieved at any later stage by any potential future researcher seeking to replicate the study, given the wealth of information provided online publicly by the European Commission concerning CA activity. Given the requirements of the EUTR as a result of its underlying experimentalist character, the public actors (CAs) involved are obliged by the commission to provide biennial evaluation reports of their progress to the commission,

Assessing the implementation and impact of Experimentalist Governance Architecture on the European Union’s Timber Regulation