Examining the coherence of environmental policy objectives and instruments for the purpose of environmental reporting

The project addresses the question of coherence, trade-offs and synergies among different fields of environmental policy (e.g., mitigation of climate change vs. conservation of biodiversity). Ensuring the coherence of its policy objectives and instruments is a permanent challenge for environmental policy. It requires a good overview of the different fields of action, policy objectives, policy instruments, their effects and interactions. Such knowledge cannot be provided by a single person or organizational unit but is distributed among many experts and networks.

In the project, an approach is developed for analysing and ensuring the coherence of environmental policy. All major policy goals and instruments of German and EU environmental policy are catalogued and fed into a Wiki tool. In addition, the Wiki is fed with information on the environmental problems addressed by the policy goals and instruments, the problems’ causes and the (intended and non-intended) changes in target group behaviour which the instruments trigger. Based on an analysis of causal chains (impact pathways) between policy goals and target group behaviour and with the help of a cross-classified table, the coherence between different policy goals is assessed. A prototype software is developed to assess environmental policy coherence in an automatized way.