Handbook on Policy Coherence to Facilitate Coordinated Approaches

15.07.2025

Policy measures must be coordinated to achieve diverse societal goals. However, this is challenging when decision-makers, each with their own mandates and priorities, work across sectors, institutions, and topics to deliver a coherent approach. A new handbook provides guidance on assessing and understanding policy coherence.

Over several decades, a multi-level and multi-sector policy landscapes has unfolded in the EU. This has led to a situation where the existing environmental policy frameworks at European, national and subnational levels are fragmented. Multiple policies must be implemented to achieve diverse societal goals such as increasing renewable energy, curbing pollution, or halting biodiversity loss. However, policies are shaped by different authorities, stakeholders, understandings, and objectives, potentially leading to overlaps, gaps, weaknesses, and inconsistencies.

Greater policy coherence is needed to ensure better coordination and alignment across policy measures, especially for complex goals such as those laid out in the European Green Deal. When coherence is high, policies can reinforce each other, creating synergies that support the achievement of multiple goals.

The purpose of the Handbook on Policy Coherence is to provide an easy guide to researchers, policy makers and consultants on how to carry out policy coherence assessments. The handbook explains a four-phased approach to coherence assessments that takes the user from the selection of policies to the synthesis of results. The handbook provides light and in-depth alternatives for assessing the level of coherence within and between policies, adaptable to the users’ needs. It also offers guidance to facilitate understanding of the underlying factors that affect coherence, with examples and guiding questions to inform coherence assessments.

The handbook was developed as part of the EU-funded CrossGov project (Coherent and cross-compliant ocean governance for delivering the Green Deal for European seas), of which RIFS is among the eight project partners. The examples used mainly describe coherence in coastal and maritime policy. However, the methodological guidelines are general in nature and applicable to many different policy areas.