Check out our latest research report that sheds light on coherence and cross-compliance in marine policies within European Green Deal.
The European Green Deal (EGD) is a comprehensive set of policy initiatives and strategies launched by the European Commission to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. Delivering the EGD requires that progress towards one strategy does not adversely affect progress towards the objectives of other strategies. Thus, delivering the EGD requires compliance with multiple strategies and objectives in concert, i.e. cross-compliance. The CrossGov project assesses to what extent and in which manner policy coherence facilitates cross-compliance.
The purpose of this deliverable is to provide the CrossGov project partners, and other relevant researchers and actors, with a methodological framework for the evaluation of policy coherence with the EGD. The CrossGov Policy Coherence Evaluation Framework offers a comprehensive methodological approach to the assessment of policy coherence to better understand where in the policy cycle or at which governance level problems or challenges of coherence emerge and where such challenges can be resolved.
To enable this, the evaluation framework is based on three components: 1) eight coherence attributes to assess against, 2) guiding questions to support the assessment and 3) a simplified coherence scoring.
The eight coherence attributes are elements or contextual factors of a policy that are relevant for influencing the degree of coherence in policy design and implementation. Importantly, CrossGov does not restrict the assessment of coherence to analyzing alignment across objectives. In addition to the objectives, various other aspects of policies that can affect coherent policy making and implementation and cross-compliance with the EGD are explored, including policy framing or mainstreaming; policy instruments; stakeholders; institutions, steering mechanisms, spatial and temporal scales; and science and knowledge. In the CrossGov project, these attributes will be considered from different perspectives:
1) Directions: Vertical coherence between EU policies and EGD objectives, horizontal coherence between EU policies, vertical coherence between the examined EU policies and corresponding national implementation policies in selected Member States, and horizontal coherence between policies at lower levels of governance.
2) Governance levels: EU, national, and subnational.
3) Policy cycle: design and implementation.
The CrossGov Policy Coherence Evaluation Framework builds upon the existing literature, concepts and frameworks, though advances this further to make it fit-for-purpose for comprehensive policy coherence evaluations and evaluations against the EGD. The main aim of the CrossGov project is to explore to what extent and in which manner policy coherence affects cross-compliance with the EGD objectives for biodiversity, climate change and pollution and the methodological framework has been designed to fit that purpose.
