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This thesis is concerned with REACH, the EU Regulation on the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals, and its regulator, the European Chemicals Agency (‘ECHA’). It has two overriding objectives. The first is to provide an exposition of REACH. The Regulation is vast and has been called, "possibly the most controversial and complex piece of legislation in European history", by one of the EU Commissioners who oversaw its genesis. Despite (or possibly because of) this, there is comparatively little substantive writing on REACH. The second aim of this thesis is to explore REACH using new governance literature and, in particular, writing which looks at post legislative norm elaboration via the use of guidance. The text of the Regulation stands at more than 130,000 words. The most recent consolidated version of REACH is 516 pages long. The Regulation is complex and dense and lengthy. Accompanying this complex legislation are more than one million words of official guidance produced by ECHA. To date, there have been a small handful of case studies which use particular legislative regimes to explore the challenges posed by post legislative norm elaboration via guidance. The yoking of post legislative soft norms to REACH has seen a complex transformation; one which was only partially foreseen in the Regulation (and likely also only partly foreseen in the minds of the legislature). As such, REACH is a good example of an evolving system of EU governance that is both associated with the Community Method and is also differentiated, new, complex and nuanced. However, REACH also acts as a challenge to a number of assumptions in the new governance literature, including: that new governance is non-hierarchical; that yoked soft norms are complementary and come only from the state; and that soft law elaborates solely on framework norms.

This thesis is concerned with REACH, the EU Regulation on the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals, and its regulator, the European Chemicals Agency (‘ECHA’). It has two overriding objectives. The first is to provide an exposition of REACH. The Regulation is vast and has been called, "possibly the most controversial and complex piece of legislation in European history", by one of the EU Commissioners who oversaw its genesis. Despite (or possibly because of) this, there is comparatively little substantive writing on REACH. The second aim of this thesis is to explore REACH using new governance literature and, in particular, writing which looks at post legislative norm elaboration via the use of guidance. The text of the Regulation stands at more than 130,000 words. The most recent consolidated version of REACH is 516 pages long. The Regulation is complex and dense and lengthy. Accompanying this complex legislation are more than one million words of official guidance produced by ECHA. To date, there have been a small handful of case studies which use particular legislative regimes to explore the challenges posed by post legislative norm elaboration via guidance. The yoking of post legislative soft norms to REACH has seen a complex transformation; one which was only partially foreseen in the Regulation (and likely also only partly foreseen in the minds of the legislature). As such, REACH is a good example of an evolving system of EU governance that is both associated with the Community Method and is also differentiated, new, complex and nuanced. However, REACH also acts as a challenge to a number of assumptions in the new governance literature, including: that new governance is non-hierarchical; that yoked soft norms are complementary and come only from the state; and that soft law elaborates solely on framework norms.