Quantifying the coherence of development policy priorities

A concept that seemed prevalent in the broader development community, and especially in policy circles, is "policy coherence". To our surprise, most of the work on this topic was theoretical or conceptual. It seemed necessary to formalise this idea and quantify it to provide policymakers with tools to systematically evaluate whether (and how much) the actions (priorities) or governments are coherent with their goals (aspirations). This is the first quantitative study on policy coherence for development.

Over the last 30 years, the concept of policy coherence for development has attracted the attention of academics, practitioners and international organizations. However, its quantification and measurement remain elusive. To address this challenge, we develop a quantitative counterfactual-based framework to measure the coherence of policy priorities for development. Our framework takes account of the country-specific constraints facing governments in trying to reach development goals. We present a new definition of policy coherence that employs resource allocations as the baseline to construct a coherence index. We validate this coherence index by producing country-specific estimates that are consistent with well-known cases of development strategies, both successful and failed. Our results highlight the limitations of assessing coherence in terms of benchmark comparisons using development-indicator data. Our framework sheds new light in a promising direction to develop bespoke analytic tools to meet the 2030 Agenda.