Designing legislation for restoration: A comparative review of laws in the EU, Japan and California

Abstract There is an urgent need to scale up global restoration. This must be supported by facilitative legislative frameworks. However, there is scant literature considering the structure and content of such legislation, including from a comparative perspective. In this paper, we adopt a functionalist comparative approach to examine examples of restoration legislation at different governance scales (specifically, the EU, Japan and California). We highlight important differences in procedural and substantive components of the legislation, as well as differences in definitions of restoration and extent of engagement with international frameworks. We argue that an effective restoration framework should encompass substantive goals or objectives for restoration, supplemented by procedural mechanisms to facilitate restoration, such as regulatory permitting reform, or measures to coordinate government agencies. These features may need to be distributed across different levels of governance, as appropriate in the context of an individual country.