The Role of Ideas, Institutions, and Interests in Coherent Implementation of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals: Insights from 9 countries

Policy coherence has been highlighted as essential for the implementation of sustainable development policies. The OECD’s policy coherence for sustainable development (PCSD) framework focuses primarily on intra-governmental policy processes and institutional interactions in shaping coherence between various agendas and policies. In contrast, the comparative politics literature on sustainable development goes beyond intra-governmental processes to look at broader politics, particularly the role of ideas and interests, as complementary explanations to institutional factors in policy change. However, at present, no studies explicitly link these two bodies of literature to hypothesize how the ‘three I’s’ (ideas, institutions, and interests) may influence the degree and consequences of policy coherence at different policy stages and at different levels. This paper aims to fill this gap by linking these two literatures together and facilitate a politicized understanding of policy coherence. It introduces an analytical framework for studying policy coherence and the role of the three I’s in influencing policy coherence at different policy stages. The framework includes not only technical explanations of coherence, but also measures of their application by different actors and institutions, and whose ideas and interests are served by (not) pursuing coherence. The paper presents results from how the framework was applied – in the context of policy coherence between two global agendas: Agenda 2030 and the Paris Agreement – in nine countries: Sweden, Australia, Fiji, Germany, Colombia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Kenya and South Africa. This work will serve as a basis for further comparative empirical studies on policy coherence between climate change and sustainable development at the national level.