The emergence of the European Union Timber Regulation: How Baptists, Bootleggers, devil shifting and moral legitimacy drive change in the environmental governance of global timber trade

The European Union Timber Regulation (EUTR) was adopted in 2010. This Regulation prohibits placing illegally harvested timber on the EU market and obliges economic operators who put timber products for the first time on the EU market to exercise due diligence. So far, little research has been done to understand the politics of the EUTR. Based on 25 interviews with key informants and the analysis of 32 policy documents, this paper explains the emergence of the Regulation as a result of coalitional politics driven by both conflict and cooperation among state and non-state actors. We show that the politics of the EUTR is marked by heated policy debates and mistrust, in particular in regards to the prohibition clause and the relation between legality and sustainability. Domestic timber producers (public and private forest owners), forest industry (sawmilling, furniture, pulp and paper) and forest-rich EU member states (e.g. Austria, Germany, Finland and Sweden) represented in the Council built a CONTRA-coalition that were (initially) opposed to the regulatory changes suggested by the PRO-coalition of environmental groups and the European Parliament. The Regulation emerged through a strategic alliance between environmental groups, timber import-dependent forest industries and retailers. This Baptists-and Bootleggers alliance was facilitated by an overlap of environmentalists' beliefs and moral arguments (emphasizing the negative societal and ecological impacts of illegal logging) and timber industries' economic interests (protectionism and market expansion as well as reputational improvement). The EUTR was finally adopted through the political support of national authorities of EU member states who are timber import dependent (the UK, the Netherlands and Denmark), and the European Parliament. The paper concludes with a reflection on the importance of coalitional politics for policy change at the nexus between environmental, trade and market policies.