POLICY COHERENCE FOR DEVELOPMENT: DEFINITIONS, TYPES, AND

DEFINITIONS, TYPES, AND LIMITATIONS

The second component of NPCD is policy coherence for development, which is dealt with in this sub-section. First, an overview of PCD in the political arena is presented, which is followed by a structured overview of PCD typologies. Finally, this sub-section is concluded with a discussion about PCD limitations and causes of incoherence.

3.3.1 Policy Coherence for Development in the Political Arena

Policy coherence for development was first brought onto the political agenda by the OECD in 1991 as a measure for greater aid effectiveness (OECD, 2006). Despite continuous efforts by the EU and the OECD, a clearly defined understanding of policy coherence is still lacking.

Broadly speaking, coherence exists where there is no incoherence – whether it be intentionally or unintentionally. To be more concrete, policy coherence is the “interaction of all policies that are relevant in the given context with a view to the achievement of overriding development objectives” (Ashoff, 2005, p.1). In other words, a policy should not undermine other policies in achieving a given development goal. Agreement on the exact definition of policy coherence for development, however, has not been reached. While development scholars debate whether development is a process or an outcome, which subsequently leads to the question of PCD being a process or outcome, giving the overall perspective for analysis, policy-makers might not even be interested in a clearer definition and precise indicators to measure their efforts towards PCD (Carbone & Keijzer, 2016). Other challenges to PCD range from the measurement issues due to the lack of data to wider discussions about the priority of development over other policy fields. I will consider each challenge in more detail in the following.

Within the EU, the Commission, along with some member states (Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden), is one of the strongest advocates for PCD (Carbone & Keijzer, 2016).

The Commission strongly advocates PCD with the result that the concept has been included in major EU policy documents, above all the Lisbon Treaty. Commitment to PCD, i.e. PCD as an end in itself, seems to be the current goal in EU policy-making. In contrast to using PCD as a means to reach an overarching goal in broader development perspectives, PCD as an outcome sets a different focus. As a means or a tool, PCD could be utilized to achieve the UN Sustainable

96 Development Goals (SDGs) which provide a global framework for action until 2030. Under this aspect, PCD has a wider scope than simply avoiding incoherence. If achieving sustainable development is the main goal, every policy that does not foster the transition to social, economic and environmental sustainability causes incoherence. Instead of aligning policies to each other, which would be the PCD-as-an-outcome approach, shaping all policies coherently under the umbrella of sustainability would be more effective in light of the SDGs.

Consequently, the PCD-as-an-outcome approach has not been very successful in the quest for sustainable development. Initially, the Commission was to receive biennial reports from its member states on PCD according to the EU Consensus on Development (European Union, 2006). Those reports, however, lost their significance due to their ineffectiveness on policy change. Already before this effort to effectively reintroduce PCD in the member states, the EU members did not show great interest in implementing PCD on a national level (Carbone &

Keijzer, 2016). Consequently, some member states did not approve the EU’s and DAC’s initiatives to introduce PCD indicators to measure national progress that would publicly show the national government’s failure to implement PCD (King et al., 2012).

On a technical level, the idea of indicators or measurement poses a different concern in itself (King et al., 2012). On the one hand, measuring progress requires a starting point. Progress, whether improvement or deterioration, can only be assessed if the follow-up results can be compared with to the initial setting. On the other hand, state-of-the-art reports can be used to determine the current policy setting at a national level. The Commission, for example, has tried to measure PCD with its impact assessments (IAs). These assessments are designed to capture the impact of one policy on other policy areas, but their quality remains low and the impact on developing country is considered solely in the minority of the reports (CONCORD, 2015).

In addition, on the political level, the question of policy priorities remains. Why should development be the leading objective? Within the Commission, among member states and between the Commission and the Council, conflicting interests shape the political debate. In a democratic environment, this is a normal, and possibly a desirable, situation. Different actors represent different groups of interests. In the light, of sustainable development, the role of PCD could be strengthened, and other interests reconsidered. This, however, requires a shift from the PCD-as-an-outcome to a PCD-as-a-means approach, as already mentioned earlier.

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3.3.2 A Literature Review of PCD Typology

Since its emergence at the beginning of the 1990s, PCD has been discussed widely among academics and practitioners. Though many attempts have been made to organize the concept of PCD (see for example Hoebink, 1999b; Hydén, 1999; van den Hoven, 2004), three major contributions are considered here, which are summarized in table 8 below.

Type 1: Coherence between aid and non-aid policies. Horizontal coherence (Carbone, 2008) refers to the relation between policy arenas. With regard to development policy, it is defined as coherence between aid and non-aid policy. As already mentioned above, a country’s trade interests might conflict with its own development interests leading to counter productivity.

Existing literature often refers to horizontal coherence pointing out that this type of coherence becomes more difficult to achieve as more levels of governance are involved (Ashoff, 2005).

In Picciotto’s (2005) work horizontal coherence is labeled intra-country coherence. In other terms, it’s the “coherence of donors’ policies towards the South, and of aid policy in particular”

(Forster & Stokke, 1999).

Type 2: Coherence between the EU and its member states’ development policies. Especially with growing globalization local, regional and international layers are introduced to the existing political system. The relationship between the EU and its member states is dealt with when analyzing vertical coherence (Carbone, 2008). Put differently, it refers to different policies across the member states with regard to their overall contribution to EU development.

Type 3: Coherence of development policies across countries. This type of coherence refers to development policies from different nation states. “Coherence of donors’ aid policies towards the South” (Forster & Stokke, 1999), also called inter-country coherence (Picciotto, 2005), comprises one governance level between the donor states. In doing so, this type of coherence complements vertical coherence between national governments and the EU.

Type 4: Internal coherence (Carbone, 2008; Picciotto, 2005) is a third type of coherence which refers to a policy’s different objectives. In the case of development policies, the focus is drawn to the purposes of this policy, the channels of aid (e.g. NGOs or state aid), and the functions of aid (e.g. supporting the private sector). Bilateral aid is the primary mechanism addressed by internal coherence, whereas state agencies, NGOs or private actors can be the implementing agencies. Forster and Stokke’s (1999) definition also includes multilateral channels in internal coherence, as it is an additional channel to bilateral aid under the same

98 government policies.

Type 5: Donor-recipient coherence refers to the interaction of policies that have been adopted in the donor country and those that have been adopted in the developing country (Carbone, 2008; Forster & Stokke, 1999; Picciotto, 2005).

Type 6: The last type of coherence is multilateral coherence, which is defined as the interaction between various international organizations (Carbone, 2008). International organizations, for example the UN or OECD, tend to pursue different goals, which negatively effects the level of policy coherence. Multilateral coherence cannot be found among neither Picciotto’s (2005) categories nor Forster & Stokke’s (1999) as a separate type, but is included in internal coherence in the latter’s categorization. Multilateral coherence is partly comparable to donors’ aid policies or inter-country coherence, because both address a variety of donors.

The first, however, refers to international organizations whereas the latter refer to nation states.

Table 8: Systematic Overview of Types of Policy Coherence for Development Terminology

99 Table 8 gives an overview of the classifications of PCD, the different terminology used by various authors and a short definition of the type of PCD as described above. Coming back to the PCD-as-an-outcome or PCD-as-a-means debate, the different types of PCD as described above have different effects on policies depending on the approach taken. While policy coherence can be seen as a goal in itself, it is mostly used as a mechanism for achieving other objectives (Carbone, 2008). The NPCD approach goes beyond the PCD “as an outcome” and

“as a means” debate by arguing that focusing on the technical aspects of development comes to the detriment of normative positions (Koff & Maganda, 2016). Normative coherence is, therefore, important for achieving transformative and sustainable development (Koff, 2017b, 2017a; Koff & Maganda, 2016). However, in these studies of normative coherence, the black box of policy implementation has not been opened. This dissertation addresses NPCD in the framework of the policy cycle with particular focus on policy implementation. Analytically, NPCD is understood as the outcome of policy implementation. Conceptually, NPCD is understood as a means for transformative development.

3.3.3 Conceptual and Practical Limitations of PCD

The previous sub-sections might give the impression that PCD is an uncontested concept and policy tool. This, however, is not the case. A substantial critique arises from the fact that PCD is embedded in the dominant development structures, which are heavily criticized by proponents of post-developmentalism, degrowth, ecofeminism or buen vivir (Escobar, 1995, 2015; Gudynas, 2011; Ranta, 2018; Rist, 2008; Salleh, 2017), to name but a few. While not criticizing PCD as such, the Western approach to development is challenged based on the arguments that development reinforces old colonial power imbalances, that development centralizes the economy but fails to acknowledge the human being as the central actor of society, and that development is a patriarchic system in which women, culture and nature are dominated by Western attitudes (ibid.). Therefore, PCD’s underlying idea of being more coherent in favor of development is challenged, given that development is considered to be a strategy in favor of wealthy nations.

Notwithstanding the development critiques, with the Western approach to development governing the relations between the Global North and the Global South, PCD is a concept that is currently on global political and academic agendas. Why is policy coherence important when it comes to development aid? There are several reasons for this. First, the lack of coherence in the past has led to a lack of success in the development sector. Trade relations are often in contrast with necessary aid programs, but also other economic interests like the

100 production of cheap goods are a reason for the missing success even though development aid is provided. By applying policy coherence, trade relations could be shaped in a new way, which supports the development of poor regions actively. This can happen in two ways: either non-aid policies directly influence development policy by altering their objectives, or non-aid policies indirectly support development policies by ensuring that their policies are not conflicting the objectives set by the development policy.

A second type of justification is called strategic justification. Here coherence is seen as a tool, which can be used to shape globalization. Substantive-programmatic justification is a way of reasoning which arose from the “demand for sustainable development as the supreme guiding concept of global governance” (Ashoff, 2005, p.1). Since there is increasing interaction among countries all over the world and, therefore, increasing risk of exploitation, it is necessary to support countries, which are not as well of as the Western states. This approach was laid out by the Millennium Development Goals in 2000. Even though, however, there is a legitimate argument to apply policy coherence, the problem remains that states’ economies are not driven by development aid but largely by economic interests. Another problem that arises is the question of defining when policies are coherent. There is no framework yet, which offers standards to make policies coherent and hence it is rather difficult to implement and evaluate.

Regardless of the difficulties to measure PCD, the OECD considers PCD as a norm (OECD, 2017b). This approach is not pursued in this dissertation. Rather PCD is a concept and a tool to assess and improve coherence of the norms outlined in section two of this chapter.

A third point of critique arises with the argument that other policies might also require coherence. Health policies for example can be implemented changing the treatment of lung dysfunctions, but they would be much more efficient if industries would produce more environmentally friendly not causing those problems in the first place. If a new health care system is set up and a new factory built, it is a problematic task to keep everything coherent with sustainable development aid.

Nevertheless, “policy coherence is considered desirable for government action because deficient coherence may lead to ineffectiveness (failure to achieve objectives), inefficiency (waste of scarce resources) and the loss of credibility of policies” (Ashoff, 2005, p.11). In order to improve development aid, it is, hence, necessary to increase coherence within one policy, but also among different policies involved in the policy process.

Often incoherence can emerge even though it is tried to reduce incoherence, because there are

101 many actors involved which tend to pursue different goals and among which misunderstandings can occur. Policy incoherence can arise due to a large number of reasons which can be grouped into four categories (Ashoff, 2005): (1) societal and political norms, (2) political decision-making/divergent interests between EU and national level, (3) policy formulation and coordination, and (4) increasing complexity of development conceptualization. Since incoherence can occur in each of these areas, it is particularly difficult to achieve a high level of coherence. According to Ashoff “perfect policy coherence is [...] possible neither in theory nor in practice” (Ashoff, 2005, p.3). As however already mentioned earlier, it is still desirable to make policies as coherent as possible, since on the one hand, costs for the donating country can be reduced, and on the other hand, effectiveness in the receiving country increased. As Carbone puts it: “The task for policy-makers is to avoid unnecessary incoherence, which implies that win-win solutions are possible, whereas necessary incoherence, which results from the aggregation of legitimate conflicting interests, is more acceptable” (Carbone, 2008, p.326).

In this dissertation, several types of incoherence are taken into account: internal coherence within EU policies, horizontal coherence between development and trade policies, but vertical coherence between the EU and its member states and multilateral coherence between the EU and ASEAN. Together, these types of coherence shape the EU’s normative policy coherence for development. NPCD and normative power are closely related, as the following section will show.