Power in Context: Understanding Interest Group Influence on the Nature Restoration Law in the European Parliament

In June 2022 the European Commission proposed a Nature Restoration Law in an attempt to halt biodiversity loss within the Member States of the European Union. This revolutionary proposal is the first continent-wide, comprehensive law in its kind that holds legally binding targets and deadlines to restore ecosystems. The proposal initially received positive reactions, but once it reached the European Parliament, the process that followed resulted in a legislative rollercoaster. This research investigated the role that interest groups have played this process. The focus is on their preferences and what determines their (in-)ability to secure these preferences in the final policy outcomes, also referred to as ‘interest group influence’. It is expected that their influence is contingent on various contextual variables. These expectations challenges traditional elitist assumptions prevalent in interest group literature. The empirical analysis utilizes process tracing to investigate the legislative process of the Nature Restoration Law within the European Parliament, coupled with preference attainment to evaluate the influence of 21 interest groups. The analysis suggests that, in the case of the Nature Restoration Law, the sub-optimal outcomes for all interest groups are the result of a lack in unity among private interests, high levels of counterlobbying and a committee receptive to the views of the NGOs but held back by the views of the associated committees defending the interests of the primary sectors.