This article examines renewable energy policy in Bulgaria and Romania (2007–17) and the reasons behind the unexpected rapid growth in renewables followed by a policy reversal. While we find strong formal compliance with EU legislation regarding targets for renewable energy, an examination of institutional change and policy dismantling in both countries finds that this was not supported by a paradigmatic policy change or a transformation of the energy system. Veto players worked to dismantle renewable energy policy once targets were reached. We use insights from the intersection of socio‐technical systems and historical institutionalist literatures to explain policy dismantling in the energy sector. In doing so, we develop a socio‐technical account of renewable policy in Romania and Bulgaria. We show that this is related to the historically conditioned, path‐dependent processes of institutional change, where energy materiality shapes the parameters of political possibility and the costs of policy implementation.

The European Union's (EU) Green Deal gives increased attention to the sustainability of international product cycles by implementing 'due diligence' requirements. We examine the difficulties in the implementation of the European Union Timber Regulation (EUTR) in two countries with weak management capacities such as Romania and Ukraine. We find that domestic and transnational civil society actors can support the implementation of due diligence requirements mainly by challenging the dominant position of private and state actors engaged in cutting deals with the EU-based wood industry, as well as contributing to increasing politicisation, raising awareness and public mobilisation. KEYWORDS corruption; illegal forest activities; civil society; Green Deal; Ukraine; due diligenceThe European Union (EU) has often sought to promote itself as a leader in the field of sustainability both on the international stage (Torney et al. 2018) and by acting as a promoter of progressive environmental policies vis-á-vis its member states (Zito et al. 2020). The European Green Deal, announced in December 2019, is set to further this trajectory by promoting a green and circular economy. In this context, the sustainability of international product cycles has received increased attention (Smit et al. 2020). Implementing 'due diligence' requirements along international supply chains depends not only on member states with very different capacities and will (or lack thereof) to do so: more importantly perhaps, it is also contingent on the capacity and willingness of third countries, over which the EU has only limited influence. In order to provide an assessment of the pitfalls and potential of such due diligence systems, this article focuses on the implementation of the EU's timber legality regime that has been in place for a decade and is thus well set to provide lessons also for the European Green Deal (Partzsch and Vlaskamp 2016;Overdevest and Zeitlin 2015;Nathan et al. 2014).Our choice of the timber legality regime is motivated by the importance of forestry for achieving the goals of the European Green Deal and the significant concerns that have been raised in recent years about global illegal forest activities as one of the major obstacles for sustainability transitions. While acknowledging the complexity of the phenomenon, we use the term "illegal forest activities" as encompassing "all illegal acts that relate to forest ecosystems, forest-related industries, and timber and non-timber forest products" (Tacconi et al. 2003, 4). Illegal forest activities are driven both by supply-side factors in the countries where timber originates from and by the demand side where it is sought after (McCarthy and Tacconi 2011).

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