Open Access Journal

ISSN: 2183-2463

Article | Open Access

Promoting Policy Coherence within the 2030 Agenda Framework: Externalities, Trade-Offs and Politics

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Abstract:  The promotion of Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development is one of the 169 targets of the 2030 Agenda, and considered a key means of implementation. The 2030 Agenda, while noble and necessary to put humanity on a sustainable path, has vastly exacerbated the complexity and ambiguity of development policymaking. This article challenges two assumptions that are common in both policy discussions and associated scholarly debates: First, the technocratic belief that policy coherence is an authentically attainable objective; and second, whether efforts to improve the coherence within and across policies makes achieving the Sustainable Development Goals more likely. We unpack the conventional ‘win-win’ understanding of the policy coherence concept to illustrate that fundamentally incompatible political interests continue to shape global development, and that these cannot be managed away. We argue that heuristic, problem-driven frameworks are needed to promote coherence in settings where these fundamental inconsistencies are likely to persist. Instead of mapping synergies ex-ante, future research and policy debates should focus on navigating political trade-offs and hierarchies while confronting the longer-term goal conflicts that reproduce unsustainable policy choices.

Keywords:  2030 agenda; European Union; development policy; policy coherence; policy trade-offs; Sustainable Development Goals

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v9i1.3608


© Alexander Brand, Mark Furness, Niels Keijzer. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.