Whole-Life Carbon Governance in Building Regulation: Türkiye and Selected European Regulatory Pathways

Whole-life carbon (WLC) governance is increasingly important to the decarbonization of the built environment, yet its incorporation into building regulation differs across jurisdictions and instrument types. This study examines how WLC governance is represented in Türkiye’s building regulatory framework and in selected European governance models. It combines comparative document analysis with targeted Python-based text analysis of eleven regulatory, strategic, voluntary and methodological documents, focusing on terminology, life-cycle-stage visibility, normative language, document similarity and policy-instrument profiles. The findings show that Türkiye has an established binding framework for operational-energy performance, whereas embodied-carbon and WLC requirements remain less institutionalized within the binding regulatory core. Broader life-cycle, material, and circularity concepts are more visible in voluntary and strategic documents. The selected European cases illustrate distinct regulatory pathways: France’s RE2020 integrates operational-energy and life-cycle-carbon requirements within a single regulatory framework, while Sweden employs a specialized mandatory climate-declaration and calculation approach. At the EU level, the recast EPBD establishes a binding trajectory toward more explicit life-cycle GWP requirements, while RICS and Level(s) provide complementary methodological reference structures. The study contributes to building decarbonization research by treating regulatory and policy documents as primary governance objects and by providing a transparent and transferable framework for comparing how operational energy and WLC are positioned within regulatory hierarchies.