Policy Coherence and Governance

Poverty alleviation and ecosystem management and distribution of services are governed by numerous institutions, organizations and instruments operating at multiple levels from the international right down to the local community. Various multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) such as the Convention on Biological Diversity or the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, for example, contain agreed to goals and instruments that ripple down through governance levels and influence policy design. In much the same way international efforts such as the Millennium Development Goals or poverty reduction strategies affect national through to local decisions. As a result, many different policies and practices now exist at all levels. Coherence among policies within and across governance levels is a necessary condition, however, if intervention strategies are to be successful.

IISD is particularly interested in knowing how to design effective intervention strategies and policies to improve human well-being and ecosystems. One way to do this is to identify ways that policies can work together to achieve common goals, but first we need to know whether, and the extent to which, higher-level agreements and instruments overlap and assess potential synergies among them.

Currently our work is focused on: