Policy Coherence in Process and Outcome : Solving Sustainability Goal Conflicts?

The 2030 Agenda and the Paris Climate Agreement are the result of international negotiations and political compromises.In addition to establishing epoch-making goals, they also set the direction for how these goals should be achieved.Together, the agreements emphasise the importance of stewardship, good governance, and policy coherence in achieving sustainable development.This thesis is inspired by the increased calls for policy coherence to advance implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement, as progress is hampered by tensions and goal conflicts.Although progress has been made in understanding policy coherence across policy areas, less is known regarding policy actors' ideas of policy coherence and how they engage with the concept in on-going policy processes.The aim of this thesis is to critically examine the role of policy coherence for solving sustainability goal conflicts.I operationalise this aim through two is research questions: (1) how do policy actors engage with policy coherence?And: (2) to what extent can efforts to achieve policy coherence solve sustainability goal conflicts?To answer these research questions, I study policy coherence through an interpretivist lens.I examine policy coherence as a process as well as an outcome, and as both ideational and institutional.The thesis consists of four individual papers which explore the multi-level governance dynamics and strategic challenges of implementing the SDGs in the context of goal conflicts.These papers examine how national debates shape policy, how implementation unfolds across national, regional, and local levels, how local governments integrate SDGs into strategic planning, and how goal conflicts are navigated across diverse country contexts in Australia, Colombia, Fiji, and Sweden.This thesis shows how actors' ideas of coherence shape what goes onto the political agenda, what is considered a legitimate policy response, and which interventions are prioritised.The results show that efforts to achieve policy coherence can have different impact depending on the nature of the goal conflict and when in the policy process the efforts are undertaken.Strategic formulations of synergistic and coherent goals do not necessarily result in coherence in implementation.Instead, I show that policy coherence should be considered an active process of reconciling ideas with practical activities related to policy implementation.Clearer mandates and responsibility across administrative levels can mitigate systemic issues of displacing goal conflicts, both spatially and temporally.To conclude, this thesis shows the power of policy actors' ideas on what is considered coherent, and how these ideas can end up displacing important sustainability goal conflicts, pushing climate priorities off the agenda.Thus, future research should be directed towards how to understand, examine and solve sustainability goal conflicts of the 2030 Agenda -in policy, politics and planning.Further research should also address which efforts to achieve policy coherence are useful under which circumstances, instead of describing policy coherence as a catch-all-term to achieve sustainable development.