ULE Framework — Codebook and Scoring Protocol

The method for applying the Urban Living Lab Legal Enablement (ULE) framework: condition definitions, scoring scale, scope restriction, decision rules and coding procedure. It contains no empirical scoring data. Scoring records for individual case sets are deposited as separate records and cite this one as their methodological source. The separation is deliberate: the protocol is reusable independently of any particular case, and can be applied by other researchers to jurisdictions not covered here. WHY THE FRAMEWORK EXISTS Living lab scholarship documents extensively that ecology-oriented labs fail to become institutionally durable. It does not provide a way to identify which institutional condition is missing in a given case. Aggregate judgements do not support targeted intervention; condition-level diagnosis does. THE FIVE CONDITIONS E1 Statutory Enactment · E2 Governance Empowerment · E3 Financial Endowment · E4 Evidentiary Mandate · E5 Epistemic Translation. The conditions are sequential: each is a precondition for the functional operation of those that follow. FOUR RULES A READER SHOULD KNOW BEFORE READING A SCORING RECORD Scope restriction. Conditions are assessed against provision specifically enabling ecology-oriented urban living labs, not against general environmental regulatory capacity. A low score is not a judgement about the quality of environmental governance. Level and form are recorded separately. The score records degree of enablement; provision_form records the type of provision relied upon. Two jurisdictions may score equally while relying on structurally different provisions. Cross-case learning potential derives from difference in form, not in level. Legal force, tier and durability are three different questions, recorded in three separate fields. Whether a provision binds (rule 6.8), what it does to the activity (rule 6.9), and how withdrawable the obligation is (rule 6.10) do not answer each other. A provision can be binding and still only facilitate; two provisions of equal score can differ sharply in how easily they are withdrawn. Contested scores are a procedural declaration, not a confidence rating (rule 6.6). The mark records that the evidence admitted two adjacent values and that a staged double reading was therefore performed. A cell not marked contested is not thereby more certain in a general sense. TWO VERSION NUMBERS, AND WHY THEY DIFFER Two numbering systems run alongside each other and are stated here because earlier descriptions conflated them. The codebook document carries its own version number, which is now 3.1. Zenodo increments a separate record version on each upload, and this upload is record version 6. Earlier record versions carried codebook documents v1.0 and v2.0; the description of record version 5 referred to that upload as "VERSION 5.0", which named the record rather than the document it contained. Codebook v3.0 was prepared but never deposited, and its content reaches a published record here for the first time. A citation should name the codebook version; a link should use the DOI. WHAT CODEBOOK VERSION 3.1 ADDS A maintenance revision arising from application of the protocol to a fifth case set. No condition definition, no point on the scale and no partial/substantial boundary changes, and no score in any deposited record is affected. Rule 6.6 now defines the three fields that record the staged double reading: candidate_scores, contested_reason and reread_status. The procedure itself is unchanged. It was previously recorded in a single flag, which did not let a reader see which of the two adjacent values were in question, on what ground the provision was ambiguous, or whether the second reading had actually been performed. A flag can be set without the reading having happened; three fields cannot be filled without it. Rule 6.8 gains a fourth value, mixed, for a cell whose provisions differ in legal force. The scoring rule is unchanged: the score still follows the weakest class that is doing necessary work. The addition governs how the source is described, not how the cell is scored, so that a reader is not told a cell rests on a binding instrument when the limb carrying it to its ceiling is guidance. Where mixed is recorded, each limb and its class must be named in the coding reasoning. Section 9 records all four additions in the required-fields table. WHAT REACHES A PUBLISHED RECORD FOR THE FIRST TIME HERE Rule 6.8, legal force in three classes, with the rule that a score follows the weakest class doing necessary work. Rule 6.9, three tiers of legal condition — authorises, facilitates, does not prohibit — recorded in legal_condition_tier. Rule 6.10, durability of the provision relied upon, classes L1 to L4, read from where the obligation arises rather than from the size of the programme. Section 2.2, indicators and data types per condition. Section 4.1, what a score does not depend on. Section 8, the procedure for applying the protocol consistently across jurisdictions. The coding procedure runs to nine steps. COMPATIBILITY Records scored under v1.0, v2.0 or v3.0 remain valid and are not invalidated. A record that does not carry the three new fields is incomplete under v3.1 rather than wrong under the version it was scored under. Every version remains citable at its own version DOI, and the full version history is in section 13 of the codebook. FILES IN THIS VERSION ULE_codebook_v3.1.md — the full codebook: five conditions, scale, scope restriction, decision rules 6.1 to 6.10, nine-step coding procedure, cross-jurisdiction consistency procedure, required-field specification.ULE_Codebook_v3.1.pdf — the same document as a formatted PDF.scoring_template.csv — empty scoring record with the required fields.document_inventory_template.csv — empty corpus inventory with the required fields. RELATED RECORDS ULE Framework Scoring Dataset: Netherlands and Türkiye ULE Framework Scoring Dataset: Istanbul and New York City ULE Framework Scoring Dataset: Three US Metropolitan Regions ULE Framework Scoring Dataset: United States and Türkiye US Federal Climate and Ecological Funding Mechanisms: An Institutional InventoryPre-Registration Protocol: Inter-Coder Reliability of the Urban Living Lab Legal Enablement (ULE) Instrument APPLYING THE PROTOCOL Researchers extending the framework to new jurisdictions are invited to cite this codebook and to deposit their scoring records openly, so that cases accumulate into a comparable corpus. Contact: ozgcelik@itu.edu.tr FUNDING Prepared within the TÜBİTAK 2218 National Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Programme (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye).