Institutional Design and Policy Coherence: National Implementation Approaches to the SDGs

Implementing the 2030 Agenda poses new challenges to political institutions and processes. An integrated implementation of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and their 169 targets will require innovative governance approaches at the national and local level in order to exploit synergies and mitigate trade-offs between the SDG. However, in many countries the implementation of policies pertaining to sustainable development continues to be characterized by sectoral approaches and clearly delineated ministerial responsibilities. While it is difficult to recommend a specific design for the insitutions to be involved in the implementation process, it is clear that institutional changes will be needed to attain policy coordination and integration. Considering that deep institutional transformation will be necessary to coordinate the achievement of the SDG, it is necessary to gain an understanding about how national governments interpret the call for enhancing policy coherence for sustainable development. To this purpose, the proposed paper analyses the Voluntary National Reviews (VNR) submitted by 54 countries to the UN High Level Political Forum (HLPF) in 2016 and 2017, in conjunction with these countries’ political context and institutional frameworks (regime type, form of state organization, cabinet structure etc.). The analysis will focus on the different institutional and procedural approaches for SDG implementation brought forward by national governments, including: - Proposed institutional set-up for planning, coordinating and monitoring SDG implementation - The existence of specialized technical units, inter-ministerial units, or inter-unit agencies charged with supervising SDG implementation - Committments to guarantee bottom-up participation in SDG implementation Furthermore, the analysis will describe identified patterns of relationships between national political-institutional contexts and proposed approaches for SDG implementation and come forward with explanations of the causal relations underlying these patterns.