A coherent Green Deal
Managing trade-offs and tensions between EU policy objectives
As Europe recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) and European Green Deal present policymakers with an excellent opportunity to develop strategies that will help the EU mitigate or adapt to future crises. In order to create policies that work as they design the measures and instruments to build this recovery, it is essential that policymakers consider the interlinkages and synergies between policy objectives for policy coherence across sectors and consistency in the final policy instruments.
A key challenge to creating coherence and consistency is effectively managing the tensions and trade-offs that arise due to the connections between policy objectives; policymakers must work cooperatively across policy areas to ensure that the improvement of one objective does not come at the detriment of another.
In order to create a coherent and consistent strategy for the European Green Deal, this policy brief proposes five steps to co-create solutions to policy problems: clarification of objectives and priority setting; assessment of existing policy mix; policy integration; evaluation of proposed updates and impact assessments; and implementation, monitoring and evaluation.
Each of these steps includes a description, several exemplary methods for implementation of the step and an example of this implementation. This five-step process aims to provide research-based guidance for policymakers to create coherent and consistent policies that recognise tensions and manage trade-offs between policy elements efficiently.
