Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT): transnational dynamics of an EU experimentalist regime

Of all the EU’s external policies, the Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative is among the most clearly experimentalist. This initiative seeks to combat illegal logging and promote sustainable forestry through negotiating Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) with developing countries and requiring all firms placing timber products on the EU market to ensure that they were not illegally harvested in their place of origin. As the chapter shows, both the VPAs and the EU Timber Regulation display pronounced experimentalist features, in terms of their regulatory approach, governance architecture, and interactions with other public and private transnational regimes operating in this field. But as the chapter also demonstrates, the development and dynamics of this EU experimentalist regime are as much a product of transnational influences from multilateral institutions, NGO campaigns, and interactions with third countries such as the US, as of endogenous developments within the Union itself.