In the early 1990s, the international community realised that development aid policies could not be effective unless coherence is achieved with other public policies of industrialised nations, the impact of which sometimes weighs much more heavily on developing countries. Consequently, this principle of coherence now constitutes one of the objectives of the international institutions, most notably the European Union which included it in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Policy coherence for development also forms an integral part of the Millennium Development Goals, which commit the oeCD countries to examine the impact of their policies on developing countries.
Three levels of coherence come under the exclusive responsibility of the donors and are therefore identified as central in the study: - internal coherence (consistency of the development policy itself between its goals and objectives, modalities and protocols), - intra-governmental coherence (Consistency across all policies of an oeCD country in terms of their contribution to development) and, to a limited extent, - intergovernmental coherence (which compares the policies of the different oeCD countries in terms of their contribution to development). The study's first purpose is to shed light upon the different facets of the concept of coherence. The second is to perform an exhaustive review of what the Member States and European Union institutions have undertaken. In recognition of this imperative, several Member States and institutions have actually set up mechanisms specifically designed to promote policy coherence for development. The study has grouped them into three main categories: - mechanisms coming under general policy and political decisions, - institutional and administrative mechanisms, - and assessment and advisory mechanisms.
This study will hopefully contribute to the consideration of the best means to enrich the institutional mechanisms in order to ensure a more vigorous implementation of the principle of coherence. The evaluation that is currently being carried out of a selection of mechanisms will subsequently enrich this debate by shedding further light on their effectiveness.