With the 2030 deadline to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) less than ten years away, progress on the Goals is uneven, both across and within countries. This is largely because, in most countries, policies tend to be formulated on the basis of short-term priorities, often without taking into account their impacts on other sectors and other countries. Improving policy coherence – and the government mechanisms and capacities that underpin it – is crucial for collective action on global sustainability.
Italy’s National Action Plan for Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development (NAP) was developed in accordance with the 2019 OECD Recommendation on Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development (PCSD), and it forms part of the 2022 National Sustainable Development Strategy’s (NSDS) revision process. The NAP is strongly oriented toward enhancing co-ordination in the public administration to more effectively and inclusively mainstream sustainable development across policy sectors and levels of government, while taking into account the impact of domestic policies on developing countries.
The PCSD Action Plan results from the project Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development: mainstreaming SDGs in the Italian Decision Making launched in 2020, funded by the Technical Support Instrument (TSI) of the European Commission, and implemented by the DG EC (Directorate-General for Circular Economy) within the Italian Ministry for Ecological Transition (MiTE) in close collaboration with the OECD. It builds on the 2021 OECD Italy Governance Scan for Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development, which provides a snapshot of the Italian governance system’s capacities for policy coherence. The actions included in the NAP are the result of over forty multi-stakeholder consultations held since 2020 with central and territorial public administrations as well as the adherents to the National Forum for sustainable development.
Building on existing elements of policy coherence in the Italian policy cycle, the NAP provides for a set of enablers for the implementation of the 2022 NSDS The approval of this proposal via Inter-ministerial decision, of which the NAP will constitute the Annex as well as integral part in Vettore 1, firmly anchors policy coherence for sustainable development as a guiding principle for Italian policy decisions and their measurement. The NAP proposes adaptations of existing governance processes and mechanisms to ensure Italian strategies and investments systematically consider broader sustainability policy objectives. The most tangible result of these adaptations would be to empower the Italian public administration at all levels to frame the expected results of their new policies within the long-term targets of the NSDS, to ensure that they complement existing policies implemented by other ministries and take into account the impact on developing countries. Such a systemic approach to policy making would create the conditions for formulating integrated and evidence-based policies that, by tackling simultaneously different dimensions of sustainability, can accelerate the implementation of the SDGs by 2030 and beyond.