Europe has positioned itself as a progressive global player in environmental and sustainable development (SD) policies, and SD strategies should play a key role in better coordinating policies horizontally across sectors and vertically across levels of government. This paper gives an overview of the objectives and indicators employed in 24 national SD strategies across Europe, covering fi ve different welfare-state models. After highlighting some structural features of SD strategies the paper explores how coherently they address environmental and social policies, measured against the objectives and indicators of the EU SD strategy. It is shown that environmental objectives and indicators are more coherent than social ones. Regarding the fi ve socioeconomic models it was found that the signifi cant variance regarding social policy objectives and indicators is mainly because some SD strategies from Mediterranean countries ignore this dimension of SD. The paper concludes that SD strategies in Europe (in particular the EU SD strategy) unfold only a fraction of their potential to better coordinate policies vertically across different levels of government. As this conclusion is confi rmed by more qualitative research approaches, the European governance architecture for sustainable development is questioned in fundamental ways.
The analysis of interlinkages between the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the assessment of countries' progress towards the goals are two prominent research areas in the debate around the 2030 Agenda. The central questions are whether countries are progressing towards the goals at sufficient speed, and whether the SDGs can be achieved in their entirety. While it is evident that trade‐offs between the 2030 Agenda's objectives might prevent countries from achieving all 17 SDGs simultaneously, the extent to which interactions (synergies and trade‐offs) between the goals facilitate or hinder countries' progress towards achieving the 2030 Agenda has so far received little attention. The present study combines the two topics by linking the analysis of synergies and trade‐offs between the SDGs in the European Union (EU) member states with a longitudinal assessment of these countries' progress towards the goals. SDG interlinkages are assessed through Spearman's rank order correlation, while progress is calculated according to Eurostat's progress measure. Using regression analysis, we find a significant negative relationship between countries' progress and the shares of trade‐offs among SDG indicators and a moderate positive relationship between progress and synergies, suggesting that trade‐offs have a bigger influence on the pace of countries' progress towards the goals than synergies. In order to achieve the SDGs by 2030, it is thus crucial to not only exploit synergies between the goals but also to overcome trade‐offs.
In Europe, sustainable development (SD) is pursued with not one but two overarching strategies, i.e., the so‐called Lisbon and SD strategies. While the Lisbon Strategy is a genuinely European response to global economic and social pressures, SD strategies are national efforts corresponding with international (mainly United Nations) guidance to better coordinate and integrate economic, social and, in particular, environmental policies. The present paper explores the vertical coordination and coherence of the two pan‐European strategies. After reviewing the international background of SD strategies and the EU origins of the Lisbon strategy, the paper characterizes and compares the governance architectures of the two strategies. With a solid background on how vertical policy integration functions in the two processes, the paper then shows how this affects the coherence of respective strategy structures and monitoring indicators. Based on an extensive empirical stocktaking study of the objectives and indicators in Lisbon and SD strategies across Europe it is shown that, despite the stronger European coordination through the Open Method of Coordination, the Lisbon process entailed only slightly more coherent national strategies than international guidance did in the context of SD strategies. Thus, the paper concludes that the influence international organizations such as the UN and the OECD have on national policy‐making must not be underestimated.
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