The Politics of Policy Change in the European Union's Nature Restoration Regulation: An Integrative Approach

The EU policy framework for nature restoration has undergone a significant change with the adoption of the Nature Restoration Regulation. Since 2022, the EU has developed a new 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 EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030. How can this policy change be explained? This article addresses this question by adopting an explanatory framework that examines political drivers and the policy process to explain the policy shift—defined here as a change in policy intensity—using mainly process‐tracing and an analytical framework organized across three levels of analysis. It is argued 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 the shift in policy intensity.