Policy coherence in climate and SDG implementation: Lessons from the comparative politics literature

The highly cross-cutting nature of the Paris Agreement and the 17 SDGs of the 2030 Agenda raises the question of how to coherently implement these two agendas. The literature on policy coherence focuses primarily on intra-governmental policy processes and institutional interactions in dictating coherence between various agendas and policies. In contrast, the comparative politics literature goes beyond this to also consider the role of ideas and interests as complementary explanations to institutional factors in policy change. However, no studies exist explicitly linking these two bodies of literature to hypothesise how the so called 3 I’s may act as underlying factors dictating the degree and consequences of policy coherence. Bridging these two literatures and developing a theoretical basis for explaining the role of ideas and interests in achieving (or not) policy coherence is an important step in policy coherence research. Much of the work to date places a lot of emphasis on institutional factors dictating coherence. As a result, less technocratic and more political explanations for coherence are often side-lined. This paper aims to fill this gap by linking these two literatures together in the context of the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda. It introduces an analytical framework for studying policy coherence and the role of the 3 I’s at different policy stages: policy input, policy process and policy outcome. This framework is developed specifically for studying the implementation of climate and the SDGs, but can also be applied more widely in policy studies. This work will serve as a basis for comparative empirical studies on policy coherence between the two agendas at the national level.