Pathways to Transformational Environmental Policy Change: Evidence from Global Forestry Regulations

From climate change to the biodiversity crisis, the global environmental challenges we face require transformational change in environmental public policy. Recent policy studies scholarship suggests one way forward: the possibility for certain policy designs to trigger political processes that encourage the adoption of more ambitious policies in the future (Sewerin et al. 2022). We explore the potential for design-induced “upward” environmental policy change in the context of global forest conservation. To do so, we characterize five “on-the-ground” environmental forestry regulations---annual allowable cut requirements, clear-cutting allowances, road building restrictions, riparian buffer zone requirements, and reforestation requirements---for eight national and subnational jurisdictions spanning Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand. To enable comparability across regulations, jurisdictions, and time, we use an analytical framework that consistently characterizes each policy’s “setting” and level of “prescriptiveness” (McDermott et al. 2010). We track each regulation for the 2007-2022 period, permitting a systematic view of policy change across 120 jurisdiction-years. Next, we draw on historical institutional analysis to examine key drivers of policy change, paying special attention to the ways in which earlier policy characteristics may have encouraged change, and compare drivers across regulation types and jurisdictions. This study contributes a framework for analyzing how policy design may unlock positive environmental policy trajectories, with concrete policy implications for forest conservation efforts globally.