Assessing policy coherence in EU marine governance: A legal and institutional methodological framework

Marine governance in the European Union (EU) remains highly fragmented. This is undermining efforts to address interconnected challenges such as biodiversity loss, climate change, pollution, and sustainable resource use. Policy coherence is defined as the extent to which policies reinforce rather than contradict each other across sectors, governance levels, and geographical areas. Ensuring policy coherence is increasingly recognised as essential for effective and sustainable governance. Existing approaches to assess coherence primarily focus on the alignment of policy objectives and provide limited analytical guidance on how policies interact in practice. This paper introduces the Policy Coherence Framework (PCF) which was developed by the EU-funded CrossGov project. The PCF provides a structured and qualitative approach for assessing coherence in complex marine policy settings. It advances existing approaches by systematically linking policy objectives to policy measures, incorporating legal design features, and combining diagnostic assessment with an analysis of underlying explanatory factors. Central to the PCF are guiding questions that provide a transparent and replicable basis for analysing coherence across policies. Application to selected EU marine policy clusters demonstrates that coherence challenges often arise not only from conflicting objectives, but from differences in legal form, bindingness, timelines, exemptions, and the various measures in place. The PCF offers a practical tool for analysing and improving policy coherence in EU marine governance, particularly in light of emerging initiatives including the European Ocean Pact and forthcoming Ocean Act.