Abstract:
Policy coherence for development (PCD) — the integration of the needs
of developing countries into all policy areas — is now an EU policy goal. This article
focuses on how far this ambitious goal has been addressed in a policy procedure —
impact assessment (IA) — established to support such cross-cutting goals. Drawing
on an analysis of the 2006 and 2013 reforms of the EU’s sugar policy, it finds that
while IA offered a new venue in which to debate PCD, in practice it reproduced the
same disagreements that previously frustrated agricultural reform. The article shows
how IA was shaped during its implementation, so instead of functioning as a bureaucratic
procedure to pursue policy coherence, it simply buttressed the power of dominant
groups. Advocates of policy coherence in general and PCD in particular should
therefore be mindful that the toolbox of implementing instruments in the EU may be
more limited than sometimes assumed.
