ULE Framework Scoring Dataset: United States and Türkiye

Abstract

Version 1 — first deposit The condition-level scoring record for a most-different systems comparison of the legal enablement of ecology-oriented urban living labs in the United States and Türkiye. Five jurisdictions are scored as separate profiles — the United States at federal level, New York City, Portland, Türkiye at national level and Istanbul — across the five ULE conditions, giving twenty-five cells. Profiles: United States 1/10, New York City 6/10, Portland 5/10, Türkiye 3/10, Istanbul 4/10. One cell is held at substantial presence: financial endowment in New York City, where the obligation arises from an administrative order on consent. Why the profiles are reported separately rather than combined. Planning competence sits at different levels in the two countries, so a single national score would misstate both systems. A condition recorded absent at United States federal level is a finding about federal law only; the fifty state regimes were not individually searched and no state-level profile is scored. What is new in this record relative to the earlier case sets. Twenty cells are carried from three earlier scoring records and are identified as such in the revision_note field, which also records any value that differs from the earlier deposit and the ground of the change. Two such changes are recorded here. Türkiye financial endowment moves from absent to partial on the reading of Act 7552 of 2025 Article 12, which hypothecates emission permit charges, primary-market allowance sales, half of the market operator's trading-system revenues and half of the administrative fines to a revolving fund held by a central body; the mechanism is standing rather than project-contingent, which takes it off absent, and is attached to no instrument or territory, which keeps it below substantial. Portland governance empowerment moves from substantial to partial, for the reason set out below. Contested scores and the staged double reading. Eleven of the twenty-five cells met the codebook definition of a contested score: a relevant provision exists but its scope, operative status or planning-law applicability is ambiguous, so that the evidence supports either of two adjacent values. Each was read twice against the primary document, on 8 and 10 October 2026, the second reading taken without consulting the first and at an interval of more than forty-eight hours. The readings agreed on ten of the eleven cells. The divergence and how it was resolved. The readings parted on governance empowerment in Portland. The first reading recorded substantial presence on the statutory watershed management authority of the city's environmental services bureau combined with formally recognised watershed councils. The second reading applied the boundary rule for that condition — authority assigned generally, without the instrument in scope, is partial — and recorded partial. The divergence was resolved at the step of the coding sequence at which the readings parted, namely whether the instrument falls within the scope of the assigned authority, and the primary texts were read for the resolution. Portland City Code 17.39.010 authorises the bureau to facilitate the development and management of the City's storm sewer and drainage system facilities, so the object of the codified authority is an infrastructure system; chapter 33.430 places the nearest analogue, the natural resource management plan, with the applicant who submits it and the Council which adopts it by legislative procedure, rather than with a named governance actor; and the watershed arrangement on which substantial presence would depend rests on a Council resolution and on charter-based councils without delegated decision authority. The cell is recorded as partial. The revision note carries the earlier value, the earlier reasoning and the ground of the change, so that the first reading remains reconstructible. An external consistency check, disclosed. The eleven contested cells were additionally put to an independent blind re-scoring by a large language model working from the operational definitions and the provisions relied upon, with the first reading withheld. It agreed on nine cells. Of its two divergences, one confirmed the coder's second reading and one was withdrawn after the primary texts were read: the model had read Portland's evidentiary mandate as substantial on the strength of a five-year reporting cycle, which belongs to a Council resolution rather than to code, and Metro Code 3.07.1360(b)(1)(D) was amended on 18 December 2025 to require monitoring and programme evaluation reports only when the Metro Council directs. That probe is a consistency check on the operational definitions. It is not an inter-coder reliability test, and it is not offered as one. External inter-rater reliability has been pre-registered separately and has not yet been conducted. Three fields carry a caveat. The legal condition tier, bindingness and durability class fields were derived for twenty-two cells from the provisions already recorded in each row, under codebook rules 6.9, 6.8 and 6.10, and each such row says so in its revision note. Two cells are recorded as mixed on bindingness because the provisions relied upon differ in legal force and rule 6.8 as published offers no value for that case; the gap is carried to the next codebook version rather than resolved silently here. One decision is left open and marked: whether Portland financial endowment is L2 on the strength of the system development charge formula or L3 on the strength of the Metro natural areas bond. The durability class field records where an obligation arises, not how large a programme is. Every L1 cell in this record — a court order, consent order or permit condition — is American and arises from Clean Water Act enforcement, and the only cell in the matrix at substantial presence is one of them. Files in this version ule_scores_usa_turkiye.csv — twenty-five condition scores across five profiles. Each row carries the operational definition applied, the provision relied upon, its form, its class of legal force, the legal condition tier, the durability class, the coding reasoning, the source document, the levels searched, the contested declaration with its candidate values and the ground of the ambiguity, the reading status, the score held in any prior record, and the revision note. document_inventory_usa_turkiye.csv — the primary document corpus, each item with its class of legal force, locator, access date, ground of inclusion and the conditions it informs. Items excluded after examination are retained with their reason, so that an exclusion is auditable rather than invisible. initiative_inventory_turkiye.csv — Türkiye initiatives, recorded for one purpose only: to establish that a recorded legal deficit binds rather than merely goes unused. No score depends on this file. Related records Codebook and scoring protocol — 10.5281/zenodo.21645631Netherlands and Türkiye scoring record — 10.5281/zenodo.20811366Istanbul and New York City scoring record — 10.5281/zenodo.21649244Three US metropolitan regions scoring record — 10.5281/zenodo.21675193US federal climate and ecological funding mechanisms — 10.5281/zenodo.23037941Pre-registration protocol, inter-coder reliability — 10.5281/zenodo.23061439