Edgar Francisco JIMENEZ BEDOLLA

Abstract

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) has become a cornerstone of circular economy policy, yet the regulatory processes that define the mandates of Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs) remain a "black box" in academic literature. In France, the drafting of PRO specifications is embedded in a simultaneous twofold consultation process: a technical expert committee (CiFREP) and an open public consultation. Drawing on the theory of informational lobbying, this paper investigates how the French Ministry for Ecological Transition navigates the informational asymmetries inherent in environmental regulation. We utilize an original dataset of 779 stakeholder contributions collected across 23 regulatory initiatives between 2021 and 2025, comprising both publicly scraped comments and manually extracted minutes from CiFREP expert meetings. We employ a novel NLP pipeline that combines document-diffing techniques to isolate textual modifications between draft and final decrees with Large Language Model (LLM) processing to categorize the regulatory intent of these changes. By projecting stakeholder inputs and regulatory shifts into a shared semantic space, we compute cosine similarity scores to quantify the degree of influence across different actor types. This research contributes to the literature on interest group influence and environmental governance by providing a scalable, quantitative framework to measure how stakeholder discourse is converted into binding regulatory content.