ULE Framework — Codebook and Scoring Protocol

The method for applying the Urban Living Lab Legal Enablement (ULE) framework: condition definitions, scoring scale, decision rules and coding procedure. It contains no empirical scoring data. Scoring records for individual case sets are deposited as separate records and cite this one as their methodological source. This separation is deliberate: the protocol is reusable independently of any particular case, and can beapplied by other researchers to jurisdictions not covered here. Why the framework exists: Living lab scholarship documents extensively that ecology-oriented labs fail to become institutionally durable. It does not provide a way to identify which institutional condition is missing in a given case. Aggregate judgements do not support targeted intervention; condition-level diagnosis does. The five conditions: E1 Statutory Enactment E2 Governance Empowerment E3 Financial Endowment E4 Evidentiary Mandate E5 Epistemic Translation. Conditions are sequential: each is a precondition for the functional operation of those that follow. Two rules that matter most: **Scope restriction.** Conditions are assessed against provision specifically enabling ecology-oriented urban living labs, not against general environmental regulatory capacity. A low score is not a judgement about environmentalgovernance quality. **Level and form are separate.** The score records degree of enablement; `provision_form` records the type of provision relied upon. Two jurisdictions may score equally while relying on structurally different provisions. Cross-case learning potential derives from difference in form, not in level. Applying the protocol: Researchers extending the framework to new jurisdictions are invited to cite this codebook and to deposit their scoring records openly, so that cases accumulate into a comparable corpus. Contact: [e-mail] Related records - ULE Scoring Dataset: Netherlands and Türkiye — https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20811367- ULE Scoring Dataset: Istanbul and New York City — https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21649245- ULE Scoring Dataset: Three US Metropolitan Regions — Funding: Prepared within the TUBITAK 2218 National Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Programme (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkiye). Revision: VERSION 5.0 (July 2026) This version is a substantive revision arising from application of the protocol to further jurisdictions and from methodological work on the framework's aggregation logic. The changes are: Section 4.1 added — the output of a scoring exercise is an ordered profile and a break position, not a scalar total. Totals carry no comparative claim on their own. Rule 6.4 rewritten — E5 is decomposed into reach (standing to affect a spatial planning decision) and trigger (revision initiated by evidence rather than by schedule), two logically independent components. This replaces the earlier procedurally-absent / reach-absent formulation with terminology that names what is present rather than what is missing, and specifies the intervention each configuration requires. Rule 6.6 added — staged double reading for contested scores, with contested cases defined a priori and the procedure recorded. States explicitly that this substitutes for, and does not equal, external inter-rater reliability testing, which has not been conducted. Coding procedure extended from six to eight steps. Four fields added to the compliant-record specification: contested, e5_component_absent, score_in_prior_record, revision_note. Version 1.0 remains citable at its own version DOI. Records scored under v1.0 are not invalidated; the decomposition in rule 6.4 refines rather than replaces the earlier distinction.