Political drivers of policy coherence for sustainable development: An analytical framework

Abstract

Prominent conceptualizations of policy coherence for sustainable development focus primarily on the roles of intra‐governmental policy processes and institutional interactions in shaping coherence between various agendas and policies. These technocratic understandings of coherence overlook the more political drivers of coherence, such as the vested interests or ideologies that may encourage or hinder efforts to achieve coherence. This paper addresses this gap by drawing on the comparative politics literature to facilitate a political understanding of policy coherence. It introduces an analytical framework hypothesizing how ideas, institutions, and interests (the three I's) may influence policy coherence at different policy stages. As such, it includes measures of how policy coherence is applied by different actors and institutions, and whose ideas and interests may be served by pursuing or not pursuing coherence. This article provides an example of how the framework can be applied to study policy coherence between two prominent international agendas: Agenda 2030 (incorporating the Sustainable Development Goals) and the Paris Agreement. Overall, the paper argues that the three I's influence policy options and shape the ambition and importance given to different agendas, goals and actors in pursuing or resisting policy coherence. This framework is suited for assessing the political divers of policy coherence through being applied to empirical data at global or national levels.

Sustainable Development Goal interactions through a climate lens: a global analysis

“…However, rather than presenting a complete systematic analysis of the full set of interactions, our priority in this paper is to examine the most relevant and interesting insights from a policy coherence perspective (see e.g. Shawoo et al, 2020Shawoo et al, , 2022, which also have the most significant implications for our future empirical work.…”

“…This finding raises the question of the extent to which these synergies can be harnessed through policy measures at the national level and within different contexts. Another question is whether the implementation of these targets would create new trade-offs that emerge as a result of varying ideologies, power dynamics and vested interests that can shape how coherently policies are implemented (Shawoo et al, 2022).…”

“…OECD, 2018). As such, in addition to institutional effectiveness, policy coherence efforts need to account for more political dimensions such as actors' vested and material interests, as well as their ideological framing, in order to increase synergies and minimize trade-offs (Shawoo et al, 2022). This would influence the extent to which policy coherence measures lead to more equitable action on the two agendas, through accounting for whose interests and ideologies are being served over others when implementing multiple goals.…”

“…It received the least policy coverage in the Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs), which are the national reports on SDG implementation progress (UN-ECOSOC, 2019). At the same time, our previous research indicates that the role of inequality for the implementation of the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda is becoming increasingly important, particularly from a policy coherence perspective, as it tends to lead to goal conflicts in national implementation (Shawoo et al, 2020(Shawoo et al, , 2022. Moreover, despite widespread global adoption of the 2030 Agenda, no country is on track to achieve the SDGs (Biermann et al, 2022).…”

“…Second, we will conduct national-level case studies in nine countries (Australia, Colombia, Fiji, Germany, Kenya, Philippines, Sri Lanka, South Africa and Sweden ). This work will enable us to explore the political dimensions of policy coherence measures between climate change and sustainable development (Shawoo et al, 2022). These case studies will enable us to empirically answer the why question: specifically, why are or aren't synergies and/or trade-offs at the global level manifesting on the ground?…”