In this interview, Antonio Basilicata discusses the research and findings of the recent review article in Environmental Politics – The role of norms in EU forest conservation politics – current trends and avenues for research.
Congratulations on your recent article! What is the key message that you hope people take from this research?
Thank you very much! There are two key messages that I hope readers can take away from the review article. The first is that norms are already deeply embedded in forest conservation politics, even if we do not always conceptualise or study them explicitly as norms. Forest governance research has a rich tradition of examining interests, beliefs, institutions, discourses, and competing ideas about what constitutes “good” forest management. What I found, however, is that there remains considerable potential to connect this scholarship more closely with International Relations (IR) research on norms. In the literature I reviewed, the term “norm” is sometimes used quite broadly or interchangeably with related concepts such as laws, customs, or beliefs. While these concepts are sometimes interconnected, they are not necessarily synonymous. IR norms research offers a precise analytical vocabulary for examining what kinds of socially shared expectations exist, whom they apply to, and how they shape understandings and practices of appropriateness.
The second message is that we should not think of norms as static standards that simply originate at the international or supranational level and then travel downwards until local actors comply with them. The process is much more dynamic. Norms are both structuring and socially constructed, they shape actors’ understandings and behaviour, while actors continuously contest their meaning. This dynamic is particularly visible in EU forest politics, where international environmental commitments, EU strategies and legislation, national forest policy traditions and paradigms, as well as locally embedded practices interact with one another. Bringing IR norms research into closer dialogue with forest and environmental governance scholarship can help us understand how the meaning of norms changes as they move between governance levels and encounter different actors and practices.
How would a stricter IR definition of norms, with actor, behaviour, and “oughtness,” change readings of Green Deal forest politics?
It does not necessarily mean that we need a stricter definition of norms. Rather, being more precise about the concepts we use in our academic work is important for advancing scholarly discussions, and this point extends well beyond forest politics and norms research. The tripartite understanding I propose in the paper should therefore be seen as a starting point for thinking more systematically about these distinctions.
Applied to the European Green Deal, this means, for example, that we should treat both binding and non-binding policies and policy instruments as institutional expressions through which underlying norms can be operationalised. This perspective can also help us unpack disagreements that might otherwise appear simply as conflicts between “conservation” and “forestry”. Actors may agree on a broad principle such as sustainable forest management while holding quite different understandings of what that principle requires in practice. A forest owner, a ministry, and an environmental NGO might all endorse sustainability, for example, but can attach different behavioural expectations to it.
The “oughtness” component of norms directs our attention precisely towards these claims about what actors should do and what should constitute appropriate behaviour. From there, we can ask who has the authority to establish such expectations, how they become institutionalised, and how alternative interpretations are marginalised, accommodated, or contested. This could provide a more differentiated reading of European Green Deal politics. Rather than seeing a norm spreading from Brussels towards member states, we could probably identify clusters of overlapping norms at different governance levels concerning biodiversity, climate, forestry, restoration, deliberation, subsidiarity, and justice. The question then becomes how these norms interact and how actors negotiate situations in which different ideas point in different directions. That complexity is, in my view, precisely what makes contemporary EU environmental politics so interesting for norms research.
With National Restoration Plans now due, where do you expect restoration norms to be localised rather than openly contested?
This is an interesting question because we are looking at an empirical process that is only beginning to unfold. My expectation is that contestation will become particularly visible where there is broad acceptance of restoration as a general objective, but variation over what restoration should actually mean in a particular context. I do not think that many actors fundamentally oppose the idea of restoring ecosystems. Rather, differences are likely to emerge over how restoration should be pursued in practice and how the requirements of the Nature Restoration Regulation should be translated into very different national and local contexts. There is also still a degree of legal uncertainty surrounding the Regulation that will shape its implementation, and I assume that some of these questions will ultimately have to be clarified in court rooms.
This gives us good reasons to pay particular attention to implementation and compliance. EU-level expectations encounter historically embedded national and local practices rather than entering an empty space. Local forest owners and managers, for instance, are influenced by national policies and standards, but at the same time they contribute to norm development through their own practices. I would therefore look closely at decisions about what a restored forest should actually look like, i.e. which ecological conditions are chosen as reference points, which areas are prioritised for restoration, and which forms of intervention are regarded as legitimate. These choices are potential sites of contestation. At the same time, an important part of this process will be how the European Commission seeks to ensure that legally binding requirements are implemented appropriately across diverse national and local contexts.
Regarding subsidiarity: how should IR norms research treat subsidiarity when EU conservation targets collide with national forestry competences?
I think we should take subsidiarity and national sovereignty seriously as part of the normative landscape rather than treating them as institutional or legal obstacles. Forest governance is particularly revealing in this respect because there is no straightforward division whereby forests belong exclusively to one level of governance. Member states retain important legislative competences over forestry, while the EU has significant responsibilities in environmental policy, including biodiversity and climate. Forests sit precisely at the intersection of these policy domains. It would therefore be misleading to assign forest politics exclusively to either the national or the EU level, and much recent research has similarly emphasised this complexity.
Biodiversity conservation and restoration can generate an expectation that collective European environmental objectives require coordinated action, while subsidiarity generates an expectation about the appropriate level at which decisions should be taken. National sovereignty, local ownership rights, participation, and justice can introduce further normative claims about legitimate authority.
The analytically interesting questions are therefore not simply whether the subsidiarity principle constrains European action, but who invokes subsidiarity, under what circumstances, and with what understanding of appropriateness. Looking at the issue in this way allows us to understand subsidiarity not only as a principle governing the allocation of competences, but also as something actors can contest. Again, courts become particularly interesting in this respect. My review identifies both European and national courts as increasingly important sites of norm contestation. Case law can influence not only how conservation requirements are understood but also wider debates about the scope of EU competences and national sovereignty in forest-related governance.
Finally, what’s next? Are you publishing more on this topic?
For me, this article is very much a starting point for further research on the role of norms in forest conservation and restoration politics as part of my PhD. Because it is a systematic literature review, one of the obvious next steps is to move from mapping how the literature conceptualises norms towards more theoretical and empirical work examining how particular norms are contested and gain meaning in use through concrete political processes.
One direction I find particularly interesting is the relationship between EU-level normative change and national and local implementation. My review shows that diverse actors can themselves act as norm entrepreneurs by reinterpreting existing norms, contesting particular meanings, and potentially contributing to the emergence of new ones. There is considerable scope for further empirical research on these reciprocal dynamics. Another article from my PhD follows this line of argument by examining norm diffusion between the EU Biodiversity and Forest Strategies and the national levels in Germany and Spain.
Restoration is another particularly interesting area in which questions of localisation, contestation, and power become empirically visible, and one I hope to publish more on in the near future. Another avenue highlighted in the article that I want to pursue further is the role of courts and litigation. Judicial actors remain comparatively underexplored in forest-politics research, even as environmental governance is becoming increasingly judicialized. Existing cases under EU nature conservation law already demonstrate their relevance, while newer Green Deal legislation may create additional sites of judicial contestation. More broadly, I would like to continue developing the dialogue between IR norms research and environmental and forest governance scholarship. Bringing these literatures together can, I think, tell us a great deal about the ideational dynamics shaping environmental politics.
Bio
Antonio Basilicata is a PhD researcher at the Chair of Forest and Environmental Policy at the University of Freiburg. His research examines the governance of forest conservation and restoration, focusing on how (environmental) norms are contested and institutionalised at the intersection of forest, biodiversity, and climate politics, particularly within the EU and its member states. With a background in political science and law, Antonio draws on constructivist IR and European integration scholarship to study norm dynamics in multi-level governance settings.
