The coherence agenda

The trend for policy coherence has risen onto the political agenda over the last few years due to debates about government effectiveness. Policy coherence is about ensuring that policies across government departments and donor agencies reinforce each other towards agreed objectives. Four levels of policy coherence can be identified:

• 'Internal' consistency within donors' aid programmes
• 'Whole of government' consistency between a donor’s aid and non-aid programmes
• 'Harmonisation' of aid policies between donors
• 'Alignment' between a donor government's policy and recipient countries national strategy.

Policy coherence via the whole-of-government approach, which aims to create consistent policy between different government departments, is also high on the international agenda. In particular, coordination is increasingly sought between agencies and ministries dealing with development, security, and foreign policy at the partner country level and in donor capitals and organisation headquarters. As a result, development agencies are expected to contribute to their government’s security agenda as well as to poverty reduction and the Millennium Development Goals. This has led to concerns that human security concerns will be overwhelmed by global and national security concerns.

The coherence agenda highlights inherent tensions between the different mandates between government departments and mechanisms which should be explicitly addressed. For instance, humanitarian aid is supposed to be given according to humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality and impartiality; however these principles are often undermined when humanitarian donor action is supposed to be coherent with military action. At the international level, care must be taken to ensure that collective security efforts address the vast human security concerns of the developing world, and are proportionally balanced to terrorism-related security concerns.