The Politics of EU Nature Restoration Regulation

This paper proposes a three-tier framework for analyzing the politics of Nature Restoration Regulation in the EU. The EU has developed the first comprehensive and continent-wide legislation to restore degraded ecosystems and halt biodiversity loss, which came into force in August 2024 and is an integral part of the EU Green Deal and the Biodiversity Strategy for 2030. How can this legislative reform be explained? I address this question by examining political drivers and policy process of the Nature Restoration Regulation, relying mainly on process tracing using a variety of primary and secondary sources and applying an analytical framework articulated across three levels of analysis. I argue that while regional and international economic factors acted as antecedent variables forming the background to the regulation, they interacted with two independent variables, EU institutional factors and domestic actors’ preferences, which explain the controversy over the regulation and its distinctive modes and outcomes.