Experimentalist Interactions: FLEGT and the Transnational Timber Legality Regime

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Introduction
Over the past 15 years, something approaching a joined-up transnational timber legality regime has progressively emerged from the intersection of multiple public and private initiatives across different geographical regions and levels of governance. At the heart of this joined-up regime is the European Union's Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative, which includes two main components: (1) negotiating Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) with producer countries to build domestic institutions that assure the legality of exported timber and promote sustainable forest governance; and (2) implementing legislation in the form of the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR) that makes it an offense to place illegally harvested timber from whatever source on the European market and obliges firms to demonstrate "due diligence" that they have not done so. As we have argued elsewhere (Overdevest 2014(Overdevest , 2018, the EU FLEGT initiative is built around an experimentalist governance architecture, based on extensive participation by public and private stakeholders in establishing and revising open-ended framework goals and metrics for assessing progress towards them through continuous monitoring and regular review of local implementation, underpinned by a penalty default to sanction non-cooperation. During the same period, other major consumer markets such as the United States, Australia, and South Korea have likewise adopted legislation prohibiting the import of wood harvested illegally in its country of origin. In response, the major transnational private forest certification schemes -the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) -have revised their standards and indicators to meet the ensuing timber legality verification requirements in these jurisdictions. These developments, together with ongoing campaigns by transnational NGOs and advocacy networks to expose legality violations, have put growing pressure on both consumer and producer countries around the world to adopt measures of various kinds to combat trade in illegal wood. This paper analyzes the interactions between the EU FLEGT initiative and the other major components of the timber legality regime complex. It explores how far, and through what institutional channels and mechanisms, these interactions are producing a joined-up transnational regime, based on a shared normative commitment to combat illegal logging and cooperative efforts to implement and enforce it. First, however, section 2 sets out what is meant by a "joined-up transnational regime" for timber legality and discusses how to characterize it theoretically.
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3406065 Section 3 analyzes the EU FLEGT initiative as the experimentalist core of the transnational timber legality regime complex, while sections 4 and 5 examine its interactions with public legality regulations in other consumer countries and private certification and service provision schemes respectively. Section 6 discusses the prospects for integrating China, the world's biggest importer and exporter of wood products, into the emerging transnational legality regime. Section 7 concludes by reviewing the key experimentalist mechanisms fostering horizontal coordination within the transnational timber legality regime, identifying outstanding gaps, and considering the prospects for further integration. This paper is based on exhaustive documentary research on materials produced by the principal institutions comprising the transnational timber legality regime complex, including the EU, national governments, international organizations, transgovernmental networks, NGOs, business associations, and think tanks, together with participation in a variety of expert and stakeholder meetings.
It also draws more than 100 interviews with public officials, civil society activists, business leaders, consultants, and independent experts in the EU, Ghana, and Indonesia conducted since 2011. 1 In this paper, we limit our references to individual interviews to support for specific factual and interpretive claims.

Characterizing the Transnational Timber Legality Regime
More than 25 years after the failure of proposals for a binding global forest convention at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, there is still nothing like an overarching multilateral forest governance regime. The "Global Objectives" of the United Nations Forum on Forests's "Non-Legally Binding Instrument on All Types of Forest", which include preventing deforestation and promoting sustainable forest management, remain at a very high level of generality, with voluntary national reporting and no specific indicators to measure progress towards them. At a regional level, similarly, intergovernmental negotiations for a "Legally Binding Agreement on Forests in Europe" collapsed acrimoniously in 2013 and have never been resumed (UN Economic and Social Council 2017;Overdevest & Zeitlin 2015: 157, 163;Humphreys 2006Humphreys , 2015. Other regional organizations, such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Experts' Group on Illegal Logging and Associated Trade (EGILAT) and the Association of South East Asian Nations' Senior Officials on Forestry Meeting are no closer to achieving a binding multilateral agreement among their members. 2 Yet, as this paper will argue, something like a "joined-up" transnational regime has emerged over the past 15 years from interactions between multiple public and private initiatives or "schemes", operating across jurisdictions at different levels within what following Abbott (2012,2014) could be called the "transnational regime complex for forest governance". 3 This emerging regime is focused on ensuring timber legality and improving domestic forest governance, but with significant implications for related issues such as sustainable forest management.
In what sense can the various components of the transnational timber legality regime be considered "joined-up"?
In this paper, we will focus on four major interrelated developments to support this claim: 1. Growing convergence among actors and initiatives around a shared problem definition and accompanying norms, principles, and framework goals for combating illegal logging.
2. The diffusion of mutually reinforcing and often explicitly cross-referencing rules and standards across jurisdictions and schemes (both public and private).
3. Progressive institutionalization of practical cooperation among formally autonomous actors and schemes to advance these common goals, including information sharing, alignment of regulatory approaches, and collaborative enforcement activities.
4. An increasing focus on monitoring, review, and revision of practices, procedures, and programs at multiple levels, informed by comparison of implementation experiences across jurisdictions and schemes.
How can this emerging regime be characterized theoretically? As we have already observed, it is not a classic integrated multilateral regime, with a monopolistic international institution empowered by participating states to oversee a comprehensive set of hierarchical rules for a 2 https://www.apec.org/Groups/SOM-Steering-Committee-on-Economic-and-Technical-Cooperation/Working-Groups/Illegal-Logging-and-Associated-Trade; http://asean.org/storage/2016/10/Strategic-Plan-of-Action-for-ASEAN-Cooperation-on-Forestry-2016-2025.pdf. 3 Abbott defines a "transnational regime complex" as a "loosely connected but…still fragmented…group of institutions" operating in a global policy field that includes non-state and sub-national actors as well as states and interstate organizations (Abbott 2014: 60). specific issue-area or policy domain -what de Búrca et al. (2013: 729-32) call "Mode One Global Governance". Nor can it be considered a "nested regime complex", as there is no single interstate institution which is "hierarchically superior to transnational schemes, with authority to resolve any rule inconsistencies" (Keohane & Victor 2011: 7;Abbott 2012: 583).
But the emerging timber legality regime is also far from representing a mere case of "polycentric governance", as conceived by Ostrom (2010) and others, in which a multiplicity of autonomous, self-organizing groups of actors tackle common-pool resource problems at various scales, but may learn from observation of each other's experiences and gradually come to form an overarching system through voluntary specialization on complementary functional niches (Abbott 2012: 584-7;Jordan et al. 2018; cf. also Hoffman 2011 on spontaneous "self-sorting" within contemporary climate governance). As the preceding discussion of "joined-up governance" indicates, there is too much formal coordination and explicit cooperation among the various components of the timber legality regime, both within and beyond the EU FLEGT initiative, to fit the polycentric model, including collaborative enforcement of sanctions for non-compliance with its norms and rules.
Neither can the emerging timber legality regime be properly characterized in terms of "orchestration", where a focal international organization, lacking hierarchical authority, implementation capacity, and enforcement powers, enlists the cooperation of intermediary actors with complementary capabilities and steers their activities through material incentives, ideational support, and other "soft" forms of influence (Abbott & Snidal 2009;Abbott 2012Abbott , 2013Abbott et al. 2015). First, there is no single focal institution which orchestrates the transnational timber legality regime, even if, as we shall see, the European Commission does make some use of such indirect governance techniques within the EU FLEGT initiative. Second, orchestration as Abbott and colleagues define it focuses primarily on enhancing the scope and effectiveness of "regulatory standard setting", understood as voluntary norms of conduct "created largely by nonstate actors and address[ing] nonstate actors rather than states" (Abbott 2012: 572). By contrast, the timber legality regime, as its name suggests, centers around the implementation and enforcement of mandatory rules, some of which are based on binding agreements between states, even if these rules, as we shall see, function in a very different way than those of conventional hierarchical regimes.
Finally, the roles performed by different types of actors in the timber legality regime, as we shall also see, are more polyvalent and polyarchic than in the classic orchestration model, as key steps in its development have frequently been initiated by non-state actors rather than international organizations or states.
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3406065 On first inspection, the emerging timber legality regime might appear to resemble most closely what Keohane and Victor (2011) call a "loosely coupled regime complex": a nonhierarchically inter-linked set of institutions operating in the same transnational issue-area without an overarching governance architecture. Although there is indeed no hierarchical relationship between the main components of the timber legality regime complex, we argue in this paper that that it does have an identifiable core, in the form of the EU FLEGT initiative, whose experimentalist governance architecture plays a crucial role in fostering the development of a joined-up transnational regime.
Experimentalist governance can be defined as a recursive process of provisional goal setting and revision, based on learning from review of implementation experience in different settings. In its most developed form, experimentalism involves a multi-level governance architecture, whose four functional elements are linked in an iterative cycle. First, openended framework goals and metrics for gauging their advancement are established in consultation with relevant stakeholders by some combination of "central" and "local" units (public, private, or hybrid). Local units are then given substantial discretion to pursue these goals in ways adapted to their own specific contexts. But in exchange, they must report regularly on their performance, and participate in mutual monitoring, joint evaluation, and peer review. When they do not make good progress according to the agreed indicators, the local units are expected to take appropriate corrective measures, informed by the experience of their peers. Finally, the goals, metrics, and procedures themselves are periodically revised in response to the problems and possibilities revealed by the review process, and the cycle repeats. Often, such architectures are underpinned by "penalty defaults": measures aimed at inducing reluctant parties to cooperate in joint exploration and problem-solving by threatening to impose sufficiently unattractive alternatives (Sabel & Zeitlin 2012;de Búrca et al. 2014;Sabel & Victor 2017).
The experimentalist architecture of the FLEGT initiative, as observed earlier, is based on extensive participation by public and private stakeholders from the EU and partner countries in establishing and revising open-ended framework goals (combating illegal logging and promoting sustainable forest governance) and metrics for assessing progress towards them (such as legality standards and indicators within VPAs) through continuous monitoring and regular review of implementation, resulting in generalization of promising experiences and periodic revision of plans, programs, procedures, and goals at both local and central levels.
In contrast to orchestration, this architecture is underpinned not only by positive incentives, but also by negative sanctions through the EUTR, including financial penalties and the exclusion of non-conforming products from the EU market. But unlike in conventional hierarchical regimes, the purpose of these sanctions is not to compel recalcitrant firms and Zeitlin 2015).
The next section of this paper will analyze the EU FLEGT initiative as the core of the emerging transnational timber legality regime, showing how its experimentalist architecture has been progressively reinforced over time through successive cycles of recursive revision in response to implementation experience. The subsequent sections will explore how and to what extent the experimentalist architecture of the EU FLEGT initiative has led to the emergence of a joined-up transnational regime by fostering productive, mutually reinforcing interactions both with public legality requirements in other countries and with private certification schemes, focusing particularly on the institutional channels and causal mechanisms involved.

Legality Regime 4
The EU FLEGT initiative was launched in 2003 by an ambitious Action Plan drafted by the European Commission, in consultation with civil society activists and think-tank researchers, which outlined a panoply of interrelated measures to tackle the problem of illegal logging and improve domestic forest law enforcement and governance in producer countries. Most important among the proposed measures were support to timber-producing countries and the negotiation with them of voluntary agreements to verify and licence the export of legally harvested wood to the EU market. 5 While the Action Plan focused on timber legality, "better forest governance" was explicitly expected to support "the EU's wider objective" of encouraging "sustainable forest management", since many countries' legislation was already directed towards that goal (European Commission 2003: 5). The Action Plan built on the growing international consensus on the problem of illegal logging, which had emerged from multilateral discussions, notably the regional Forest Law Enforcement and

The FLEGT VPAs
The VPAs are the keystone of the FLEGT architecture. The FLEGT Action Plan invites producer countries to negotiate bilateral agreements with the EU in order to secure access to a "green lane" for verified legal timber timber imports into the European market. As of April FLEGT VPAs are legally binding trade agreements between the EU and partner countries.
The EU has established a number of requirements for the conclusion of such agreements.
First, partner countries undertake to develop an agreed set of definitions for legal timber, based on a multi-stakeholder review of existing national law, including international agreements to which they are a party, involving broad participation by civil society as well as private business. Where the review process reveals major gaps and inconsistencies in existing regulation, signatory governments commit to rectify these through legal and administrative reforms. Once agreed, these legality definitions are converted into a matrix, which includes detailed indicators for verifying compliance. The legality definitions themselves are then subject to periodic review and revision in light of implementation experience (EU FLEGT Facility 2010; http://www.vpaunpacked.org/legality-definition).
A second requirement of the FLEGT initiative is that partner countries develop a national timber legality assurance system (TLAS), overseen by an independent auditor, to ensure that domestic wood is legally harvested, transported, and exported. All such systems must also ensure the integration of imported wood into their supply-chain tracking and control mechanisms. In most VPA countries, the TLASs include separate independent civil society monitors or observers in addition to the third-party system auditor. To support such independent monitoring, all VPAs also include broad transparency requirements on public access to information on forest administration and the operation of the TLAS. The VPAs likewise include provisions for independent monitoring of their broader social, economic, and environmental impacts on the partner country, in order to identify and mitigate any unanticipated negative effect, as well as of the performance of FLEGT licensed timber in the EU and international markets (http://www.vpaunpacked.org/en/web/vpa-unpackedmultilang/vpa-elements).
6 The EU-FAO FLEGT Programme has also initiated a pilot programme for working on FLEGT objectives with seven non-VPA countries (Colombia, Guatemala, Madagascar, Mozambique, Peru, the Philippines, and Uganda), based on a local situational analysis and baseline assessment, a stakeholder workshop to set priorities and develop a national roadmap for improving forest governance, and the formation of a joint committee of EU, FAO, and government representatives to oversee and monitor agreed support activities (EU-FAO 2016: vii, 9-16 Although there are no formal mechanisms for cross-national peer review within the FLEGT initiative, regular meetings of a range of transnational stakeholder forums have served as institutionalized platforms for information pooling, critical debate, and recursive learning from comparative experience with VPA negotiation and implementation in different local contexts (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2018: 68). An informal but increasingly structured transnational experience-sharing and support network has also developed among NGOs from VPA countries such as Indonesia, Ghana, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand, addressing issues like stakeholder participation, independent monitoring, transparency, and smallholder inclusion (Jeffree 2017).
FLEGT VPAs are extremely challenging for partner country governments, both politically and administratively, in terms of their demands for multi-stakeholder participation and farreaching reforms of forest governance. They have also proved technically complex and arduous to implement. Some of the key implementation challenges concern the practical difficulties of designing effective timber-tracking and legality assurance systems under developing country conditions. But others stem from widespread but often hard to detect forms of corruption, as well as from pervasive weaknesses in domestic administrative coordination and governance capacity. In every partner country, assuring timber legality has turned out to be tightly bound up with thorny, deep-rooted political issues concerning the exploitation of natural resources, property rights, and land use, which the VPA implementation process has progressively exposed to public scrutiny and pressure for remediation. As a result of these challenges, fulfillment of VPA commitments and issuance of FLEGT export licenses have taken much longer than originally expected in all partner countries. In Indonesia, the first to complete the process, export of FLEGT-licensed timber began in 2016, nine years after the onset of negotiations with the EU and five years after the ratification of the VPA. In Ghana, where the issuance of FLEGT licenses is expected to start in 2020, the VPA implementation process has taken even longer (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2018;Ghana-EU 2018). 7 Following critical assessments of the FLEGT Action Plan by the European Court of Auditors working through a multi-stakeholder process, has developed a "Joint Implementation Framework" for setting, monitoring, and revising strategic priorities within a multi-annual action plan, building on the experience of FLEGT processes in other partner countries (EU FLEGT Facility 2017a; Vietnam-EU 2017). In Honduras, where the VPA was agreed in June 2018, a decisive breakthrough was the joint field-testing of the TLAS legality definition and verification methodology, which not only identified practical problems to be resolved, but also "created transparency, awareness and common understanding" among the participating stakeholders about the country's main forest governance challenges and the legal and administrative reforms needed to make the new system work (EU FLEGT Facility 2017a).

The EU Timber Regulation
Alongside the VPAs, the other key element of the FLEGT architecture is the EUTR, which creates an "underlying offense" of placing illegally logged timber products on the EU market, and obliges all operators doing so for the first time to demonstrate "due diligence" that they were legally harvested in their place of origin (domestic or foreign), subject to fines and other criminal penalties. Traders are obliged to keep records of their suppliers and customers so that wood circulating within the EU market can be traced back to its original source. The EUTR establishes three possible pathways for meeting its due diligence requirements. The first is possession of a valid FLEGT export license or CITES permit, 10 which serves as a "green lane" into the EU market. Second, operators can develop their own due diligence system, which includes securing detailed information on timber sources and species, as well as on suppliers' compliance with national legislation, coupled with the creation, implementation, and regular evaluation of risk-assessment and risk-mitigation procedures. The EUTR Implementing Regulation specifically encourages the use of private certification and legality verification schemes as tools for demonstrating due diligence, as long as the systems are publicly available, incorporate the requirements of the nationally applicable legislation, and include "appropriate checks, including field-visits…by a third party at regular intervals no longer than 12 months" to verify compliance, together with full traceability and controls to ensure that illegal timber does not enter the supply chain. Operators are also expected to assess in detail how the legality verification standards set by these schemes are "applied and enforced…on the ground", and to check whether there are any "substantiated reports about possible shortcomings or problems". National authorities have also begun to work together in smaller groups to map supply chains in high-risk countries, assess the adequacy of companies' due diligence procedures, 11 An infringement proceeding is ongoing against Slovakia, which is still in the process of amending its legislation to adequately cover timber imports. The FLEGT Action Plan's linkages to broadly supported multilateral goals provided a crucial source of international legitimacy for the EU's unilateral initiatives to combat illegal logging and promote sustainable forest governance. Both the FLEGT VPAs and the EUTR were carefully designed to comply with WTO rules, as well as to win the consent of developing countries, whose objections had blocked earlier efforts to negotiate a global forest convention (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2015). Rather than imposing "northern" environmental standards on the global south, the EU's approach to forest legality and governance respects territorial rights and sidesteps politically sensitive sovereignty issues. It offers developing countries an opportunity to participate in a jointly governed system of legality assurance,

Countries
The EU was not the first wood-importing jurisdiction to enact public regulation aimed at combating trade in illegally logged timber. The pioneer was the United States, which in 2008 extended the coverage of the Lacey Act (originally adopted in 1900) from fish and wildlife to plants. This amended legislation, also known as the Legal Timber Protection Act (LTPA), makes it a criminal offense to import, trade, or otherwise handle any timber taken, transported, or sold in violation of foreign laws. Penalties, which can include imprisonment, fines, and confiscation of goods, depend on the level of intent of the violator, and the extent to which "due care" 13 was exercised to avoid foreseeable risks of trafficking in illegal wood.
To This transnational campaign inspired by the successive enactment of the US LTPA and the EUTR triggered a "norm cascade" (Finnemore & Sikkink 1998) of legislative responses among other major timber-importing countries in the Global North. In 2012, Australia adopted the Illegal Logging Prohibition Act (ILPA), which makes it a criminal offense to place illegally harvested wood from whatever source on the national market. Like the EUTR, the implementing regulation obliges firms to develop documented due diligence systems for 13 Due care was not defined in the LTPA, but is understood in US tort law as "that degree of care which a reasonably prudent person would exercise under the same or similar circumstances" (Birchell 2013). 14 For Indonesia's advocacy role in the adoption of public legality regulations in timber-importing countries, see Leipold et al. (2016: 299); EU FLEGT Facility (2018a: 1). 15 Examples include the US and EU agreements with South Korea, as well as the pending EU-Japan agreement, although the latter has been sharply criticized by NGOs for its acceptance of Japan's non-binding Clean Wood Act (European Commission 2016b: 10-11; Fern 2016Fern , 2018c. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement originally included language modeled on the Lacey Act committing signatories to restrict trade in timber harvested in violation of foreign laws, but this was removed after the US's withdrawal (WRI 2018).
assessing and minimizing the risk that timber has been illegally logged and to attest compliance with these requirements in customs declarations, subject to substantial financial penalties (ADAWR 2018b: 7; McMaugh 2016). In 2016, Japan introduced a Clean Wood Act, which requires firms to "endeavor" to use only legally harvested timber. Firms which undertake to ensure the use of legally sourced wood can register with government-accredited bodies and must carry out due diligence under their oversight; in case of non-compliance, they lose their right to use the title of "registered operator", but no financial penalties apply ( Over the past decade, the major timber-importing jurisdictions of the Global North (with the partial exception of Japan) have thus converged not only on a shared normative commitment to combat illegal logging within and beyond their own borders, but also on a broad common strategy for pursuing this goal through a combination of trade regulation and public enforcement. At the same time, however, the governance architectures for timber legality regulation differ significantly across these jurisdictions, as a result of variations in domestic coalitions among NGOs and industry groups, as well as pre-existing legal and administrative arrangements . Public timber legality regulations in other jurisdictions 16 This Act builds on an earlier voluntary system for the verification of legal or goho wood, developed by the Japanese Forestry Agency to promote compliance with Japan's 2006 Green Purchasing Law, whose use in the construction of public buildings was mandated by new legislation in 2010 (Momii 2014). 17 According to a recent EIA report, in April 2018, Mexico, which is regarded as "a a significant import and trading hub for illegal timber from Latin America" also "passed a law banning the import of illegal wood products and requiring a degree of supply chain traceability" (Johnson & Gehl 2019).
lack most of the explicit experimentalist features of the EU FLEGT initiative. They take foreign laws as they stand, without seeking to reconcile ambiguous and contradictory legislation or fill regulatory gaps, unlike the updated and agreed legality standards produced by the FLEGT VPAs. Public authorities, customs officials, prosecutors, and judges are thus placed in the difficult position of assessing the current state of foreign laws and regulatory practices in order to determine whether a given timber shipment has been harvested illegally.
In the US, importers are now required to file Lacey Act declarations through a single Australia has focused its enforcement efforts on ensuring compliance with the ILPA's due diligence obligations through assessments of the largest trading firms, along with importers of specific high-risk products and pathways, such from conflict and fragile states. During the initial "soft-start" period, which ended in 2017, assessed firms were not penalized for inadvertent non-compliance, but received a "Note of Advice" setting out what they needed to change to meet the law's requirements, which will serve as a baseline for future compliance audits. The Department of Agriculture has developed a series of Country-Specific Guidelines to assist firms with their risk assessments, but importers remain responsible for considering any other information that they know or "ought reasonably to know" indicating that the [W]e wanted to focus on front-end due diligence to ensure that LL was never in a position where they had to question the legality of a shipment after the purchase was made. We required them to follow a more European model of front-loading the due diligence instead of DOJ having to investigate afterwards. Hence, I spoke with a number of TREE members about how they deal with risk categorization. Those conversations resulted in section 5 of the ECP…which divides products into risk categories based on the supplier company risk as well as the product risk. The level of due diligence required then varies depending on the overall risk category….The UK, Netherlands, and Denmark were especially helpful in providing input on the specific factors they consider. 20 Conversely, because the Lacey Act prohibits trafficking in wood sold in violation of any foreign law protecting plants, it can also be used to prosecute non-compliance with the provisions of the EUTR, which is considered a "predicate offense" under US law. EUTR's prohibition and due diligence requirements apply only to the operator first placing wood on the European market, while Lacey Act prosecutions face a high burden of proof, reciprocity between the two laws extends liability to illegal timber products exported from the EU to the US (such as superyachts with Burmese teak decking), thereby reinforcing both and helping to close a significant loophole in the transnational legality regime (EIA Forests 2018; Colborn 2018).

Experimentalist Interactions: Private Certification and Service Providers
The experimentalist architecture of the EU FLEGT initiative has helped to join up the separate components of the timber legality regime complex through productive interactions not only with public regulation in other consumer countries but also with forest certification schemes, trade associations, and other private service providers. The EUTR, as we have seen, allows firms to satisfy its due diligence requirements by working with a recognized Monitoring Organization, and encourages them to use private certification and legality schemes that meet specified conditions in their internal risk assessment process. A number of VPAs currently in the implementation process such as Cameroon and Republic of Congo likewise include provisions for incorporating recognized private certification schemes into their FLEGT licensing systems. 21 Unlike the EUTR, the US LTPA does not explicitly encourage third parties to provide due diligence systems, although participation in private certification schemes may be adduced as evidence of due care in avoiding sourcing of illegally logged wood (http://www.laceyduecare.com/). The Australian ILPA allows importers to use recognized Timber Legality Frameworks -including FSC and PEFC certification as well as FLEGT licenses -as a risk assessment pathway, though firms remain responsible for assessing their accuracy and reliability in each case, as well as any other information that would call the product's legality into question (ADAWR 2018b: 17, 44;2017: 30). To demonstrate due diligence in ensuring the use of legally harvested timber, the Japan Clean Wood Act likewise allows operators to utilize forest certification and chain-of-custody schemes (EU FLEGT Facility 2017b: 7). But only the detailed standards for imported timber issued by the Korea Forest Service officially recognize FSC and PEFC certification as proof of legality (EU FLEGT Facility 2018b: 9-10).
In both the EU and the US, trade associations, NGOs, and private service providers have sought to assist timber-importing and processing firms to comply with the legality requirements of the EUTR and LTPA through a variety of channels, including forest certification. The European Timber Trade Federation (ETTF), an early supporter of the EUTR (Sotirov et al. 2017: 73), has developed a due diligence system in collaboration with the Danish environmental NGO NEPCon, which its national affiliates are encouraged to offer their members. 22 Several ETTF national affiliates have become recognized MOs, as has NEPCon, alongside a range of other standardization, certification, and auditing bodies. 23 Soon after the EUTR's passage, ETTF hired a consultancy to assess existing private forest certification and legality verification schemes, whose report showed that none of them fully complied with the legislation, and identified key areas for improvement. NEPCon now produces regularly updated guides to how far the FSC and PEFC meet the EUTR's requirements, based on a common evaluation framework, along with a panoply of tools for ensuring legal timber sourcing (Butler 2013; Proforest 2012; Cupit 2018; www.nepcon.org).
In the US, similarly, the Forest Legality Alliance, a coalition of environmental NGOs and industry associations instrumental in the passage of the LTPA, has created online declaration and risk assessment tools, while a closely related multi-stakeholder partnership has developed "Lacey Act Due Care Consensus Standards", which encourage wood businesses to join FSC, PEFC, or Seneca Creek/AHEC US Hardwood certification schemes (Leipold & Winkel 2016: 37-42; http://forestlegality.org/risk-tool; http://www.laceyduecare.com/).
Both the FSC and the PEFC have substantially revised their standards and procedures to align them with the due diligence/due care requirements of public legality regulations in timber-consuming countries. So too have a number of PEFC-affiliated schemes in countries such as the US, Malaysia, and Brazil. The most significant modifications to these schemes have concerned the redefinition of the applicable national laws to include trade and customs regulations; the provision of detailed information to customers on the species and local origin of certified products in high-risk countries; and the incorporation of mandatory due diligence procedures into the FSC Controlled Wood and FSC and PEFC chain-of-custody standards. To prevent abuse of the latter, the FSC now prohibits organizations that have not handled certified products since their last audit from using the scheme's trademark. It has also launched an Online Claims Platform to assist customers in validating transaction volumes to ensure that mixing of non-certified material has not occurred, together with a 22 http://www.ettf.info/eu-timber-regulation; https://www.NEPCon.org/certification/legalsource/legalsource-due-diligence-system. 23 For a current list, see http://ec.europa.eu/environment/forests/timber_regulation.htm. transnational wood identification testing program to investigate species and origin claims in high-risk supply chains (Saunders 2014;PEFC 2015a;FSC 2018;TREE meeting summary, 13-15 March 2019).
Contrary to expectations, few EU timber operators have signed up to use due diligence systems provided by recognized Monitoring Organisations. Beyond the additional costs involved, the main explanation, according to the 2016 EUTR evaluation, seems to be "the fact that MOs have an obligation to report to the CA on major failures in the use of a DDS by operators". As a NEPCon official told the TREE network, "there is minimal interest in MO services because companies feel like they are inviting 'law enforcement' in, and problems will be reported to CAs". Conversely, however, MOs (including NEPCon itself) "have reported providing technical assistance to thousands of operators to develop their own DDS" Accompanying this surge have been periodic demands from the major schemes and their customers for public recognition of private certification as evidence of due diligence and as a "safe harbor" against liability for illegal timber trafficking. Both the FSC and the PEFC have urged the European Commission and the national Competent Authorities to harmonize their approach to the use of private certification in EUTR compliance, whether by providing regularly updated EU-wide evaluations of their risk assessment and legality verification procedures (FSC 2015), or by recognizing approved "EUTR-compatible" certification as proof of "negligible risk" and ultimately as a "green lane" into the European market (PEFC 2015a). Large wood operators such as IKEA, which maintains a demanding due diligence system for its complex global supply chain, have likewise pressed the EU to recognize international forest certification schemes like the FSC "as one important part of the necessary due diligence system" in order to foster a common approach to EUTR compliance across the 28 member states (IKEA 2018; EUTR/FLEGT Expert Group Minutes 7/12/2108).
In the US, too, some industry representatives advocate recognition of FSC certification "as a possibility to demonstrate due care…while 'franchising out risks'" (Leipold & Winkel 2016: 42). Following an independent consultancy-led review and "Regulatory Impact Statement" on the effects of Australia's illegal logging regulations, the Liberal-National government, which came to power after the passage of the ILPA, proposed in 2017 that PEFC and FSC certified timber should automatically be "deemed to comply" with the Act's due diligence requirements in order to reduce the cost burden on businesses (ADAWR 2017(ADAWR , 2018a. So far, however, none of these proposals for public recognition of private forest certification have been accepted, with the partial exception of the 2017 South Korean legislation. 26 US authorities have been clear from the outset that private certification, although useful in demonstrating due care, does not absolve operators of liability for Lacey Act violations, and the "main suppliers" in all of the recent high-profile LTPA cases (including Lumber Liquidators) were "FSC-certified in some capacity" (Johnson & Gehl 2019;Conniff 2018).
The EUTR/FLEGT Expert Group recognizes the need to clarify and improve its guidance to CAs and operators on the use of third-party certification in EUTR due diligence, but continues to insist that the latter cannot substitute for independent risk assessments in highrisk areas (Hinrichs interview;EUTR/FLEGT Expert Group Minutes 19/4/18;Forest Trends 2016). Thus in March 2018, an operator importing FSC-certified wood from Cameroon was fined by the UK CA for failing to conduct due diligence on its legality (UNEP-WCMC Briefing Note Feb-Mar. 2018). In Australia, the government's proposed "deemed to comply" arrangement for certified wood imports were rejected by the Senate in the face of criticisms from transnational NGOs such as Forest Trends, who emphasized the "well-documented problem" of "fraud within even the most robust certification schemes", including the FSC, and their "challenges in controlling chain of custody, particularly through any sort of processing or multi-country trade hubs", as well as opposition from domestic producer https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mozambique-forest-logging/mozambique-reforms-timbersector-to-counter-illegal-logging-idUSKBN1KG1F8; https://medium.com/@WWF/chinesecooperation-is-good-news-for-mozambiques-forests-f21e3d2c2224. 28 For earlier versions of these proposals, which included bilateral government-to-government agreements with timber-exporting countries alongside an industry association certification scheme, Since the introduction of the US LTPA, the EUTR, and the Australian ILPA, Chinese wood processing firms have increasingly shifted their imports away from high-risk countries and sources, despite being obliged to pay a higher price per unit for legally verified timber. Not only did the share of tropical hardwoods in Chinese imports decline, but so too did that of timber from high-risk natural forests relative to lower-risk sources such as plantations. Chinese forest enterprises themselves vary widely in size, management structure, and capacity to monitor and control their supply chains. A recent survey conducted by the CAF and western researchers found a high level of basic awareness of foreign legality requirements not only among export-oriented companies, but also among their domestic suppliers. The most common responses among the export-oriented firms were to apply third-party certification (mostly FSC controlled wood and chain of custody), 29 to provide information in accordance with customers' requirements, to establish internal supply-chain management and due diligence systems, and to change to low-risk suppliers. The study also shows that beyond the complexity of their supply chains, Chinese wood-exporting enterprises perceive the complexity of the transnational legality regime itself, with its varying verification standards, due diligence requirements, and penalties for non-compliance, as a major source of additional costs and constraint on their engagement. Hence the long-term see Speechly (2016: 46-7); Wellesley (2014: 11-12). 29 China has the highest number of FSC CoC certificates in the world (7349), but many of these are held by firms which do not actually handle certified products and are prohibited from using the FSC trademark under the scheme's revised rules (FSC 2019). effectiveness of this joined-up regime will arguably depend not only on the capacity of consumer countries like the EU and the US to ensure that the emerging Chinese Timber Legality Verification System meets their own requirements and standards, but also on their capacity to align these with one another, for example through a process of benchmarking and mutual equivalence assessment within the TREE network, in order to present a common interpretive face to third-country suppliers (Nathan et al. 2018;cf. Hoekman and Sabel 2019). 30

Conclusions
Although there is still no overarching global forest governance regime, an increasingly joined-up transnational regime for timber legality has nonetheless developed over the past 15 years. This joined-up regime, as this paper has shown, is characterized by four main elements: growing convergence among autonomous actors and initiatives around a shared problem definition and accompanying norms, principles, and goals for combating illegal logging; the diffusion of mutually reinforcing and often cross-referencing rules and standards; progressive institutionalization of practical cooperation to advance these goals, including collaborative enforcement of sanctions for non-compliance; and comparative monitoring, review, and revision of implementation approaches at multiple levels across jurisdictions and schemes.
The emerging transnational timber legality regime is centered around the EU FLEGT initiative, whose experimentalist architecture has fostered productive interactions both with public regulation in other countries and with private certification schemes. But this joinedup transnational regime, as this paper has also shown, remains highly polyarchic, with broad scope for independent initiatives by non-state actors such as transnational NGOs and private service providers, along with national governments, international organizations, and multidonor partnerships, in addition to the EU itself.
Horizontal integration and coordination of actors within this emerging regime thus depends on a series of experimentalist mechanisms, whose operation this paper has analyzed. One such mechanism is the normative and enforcement externalities resulting from crossreferencing and mutual endorsement of rules and standards across public authorities and 30 The ISEAL Alliance (2019) has recently produced a draft Good Practice Guide for benchmarking voluntary sustainability standards, whose principles include ongoing monitoring of continued alignment.
Examples discussed above include enforcement reciprocity between the EUTR and the US Lacey, which helps to close loopholes in both legal frameworks, and the revision by the FSC and the PEFC of their standards and procedures to align them with new public legality regulations in timber-importing countries. A second experimentalist mechanism for horizontal integration and coordination is mutual learning and peer review through information pooling, comparison of enforcement approaches, development of common methodologies and tools, collaborative training and inspection activities, and joint assessment of "substantiated concerns" of illegal logging by front-line enforcement officials from different jurisdictions within the EUTR/FLEGT Expert Group and TREE network. A third closely related mechanism is public oversight and review of private certification and national legality verification schemes within these networks, which as suggested above could eventually develop into a full-blown system of comparative benchmarking and ongoing equivalence assessment. A final experimentalist mechanism is the "penalty default" effect of the EUTR and other public regulations in timber-importing countries, which have pushed major processing and exporting countries like China to cooperate with the emerging transnational legality regime, while also inducing transnational firms to develop due diligence systems aimed at minimizing the risks of illegal sourcing within their supply chains.
The transnational timber legality regime has expanded steadily in scope and extent in recent years, as new countries have agreed FLEGT VPAs with the EU and/or introduced public legality regulations for wood harvesting and trade, while coverage of private forest certification and legality verification schemes has also expanded. The emerging regime has likewise proved remarkably resilient to domestic and international political upheavals, including the advent of right-wing deregulatory governments in both Australia and the US WRI 2018), as well as Brexit, where the UK has announced that it will continue to enforce EU rules for timber imports, including due diligence requirements, even in the case of a no-deal exit (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/trading-timber-imports-andexports-if-theres-no-brexit-deal).
The analysis in this paper thus confirms the claim advanced in previous work that a robust joined-up transnational regime can be assembled piece-by-piece under polyarchic conditions through coordinated learning from decentralized experimentation, without a hegemonic power to impose common global rules (Overdevest & Zeitlin 2014). At the same time, as the paper also shows, significant gaps nonetheless remain within the emerging timber legality regime, which if left unfilled are likely to constrain its future expansion and effectiveness.
Most salient among these is the proliferation across jurisdictions of overlapping legality standards, verification procedures, due diligence requirements, and penalties, which as we have seen in the case of China, raise the barriers and costs for firms seeking to comply with the underlying norm against trafficking in illegally logged wood. Here too, however, as suggested above, experimentalist mechanisms of benchmarking and mutual equivalence assessment through transnational institutions such as the TREE network offer a promising route to aligning the legality requirements and standards of participating jurisdictions, without imposing a single set of uniform rules and procedures across the emerging transnational regime.