Policy Capacity for Policy Integration: Implications for the Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 established a clear global mandate for greater integrated policymaking. This concern for policy integration has forced practitioners and academics to rethink many underlying principles about this relatively old but poorly understood concept in the policy sciences. However, the notion of an integrated policymaking process is one that many governments have continuously aspired for, but there is little consensus on how to achieve it. A central unifying concept in theory and practice is the link of integration to policy capacity but this remains largely unexplored. This proposed paper seeks to address this gap through a conceptual analysis of the policy integration and capacity. Building on the literature on policy design, it defines policy integration as the process of reconciling incoherent policy goals and inconsistent policy instruments and offers a typology of policy integration projects based on the degree of goal and instrument consistency: policy harmonization, mainstreaming, coordination and institutionalization. These forms of policy integration dictate the kinds of strategies that governments should adopt to arrive at a more coherent policy mix. Following the dimensions of policy capacity by Wu, et al. (2015), policy capacities are identified that are critical to ensuring the success of policy integration. This paper hopes to contribute to both academic and policy-related debates on policy integration by advancing conceptual clarity on the different, and sometimes diverging concepts used related.