Sustainability Analysis

What is this NCEA-programme about?

The NCEA facilitates  dialogue, analysis, and recommendations on sustainability challenges for Dutch international (development) cooperation. This is done under the Sustainability Analysis programme.

What is policy coherence?
Policies directed at one sustainable development goal (SDG) may have negative effects on other SDGs. A country may focus on biomass to support its national energy transition, negatively affecting tropical forests. Agricultural subsidies in high income countries may have negative effects on fair trade or food security in low income countries. One policy can work against another.

Incoherent policies create dilemmas: do countries accept the incoherence, or do they take action to make policies coherent? Voices from middle and low income countries may not always be heard in such debates. Options for action are not always clear, and may be unattractive to stakeholders of the existing policies.

The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs supports the NCEA’s Sustainability Analysis programme to analyse such dilemmas. Sustainability Analyses should be aimed at dilemmas of global importance where action may be urgently needed with a view to low and middle income countries. They should address all stakeholders, and in particular those who can take policy action. It should limit itself to emerging dilemmas with a new complexity, which require new combinations of existing expertise that no other independent programme delivers.

The NCEA holds full responsibility to determine for itself which dilemmas it will analyse, and how it analyses these. We prioritise dilemmas that appear most relevant to the populations of low and middle income countries, timely in terms of political opportunities, and feasible for us to undertake. Dilemmas may often be related to the transitions of the global economy that are urgently needed for a sustainable development.