Enabling Integrated Policymaking with the Sustainable Development Goals: An Application to Ireland

This article addresses policy coherence for sustainable development demonstrating the important role that dashboards of interlinked indicators can play as tools to coordinate interrelated government ministries for integrated policymaking at national level. Specifically, a monitoring and coordination tool is proposed based on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicators and mappings of SDG responsibilities across ministries. Drawing on studies in sustainability science of SDG interlinkages, the article presents a five-step procedure that government departments can use to construct indicator sets from official SDG indicators to support integrated policymaking for a specific sector. I apply the method to Ireland’s marine sector. Ireland is an interesting case because although many countries report mapping SDG responsibilities across ministries, Ireland’s Voluntary National Review explicitly maps these responsibilities for all 17 SDGs and 169 targets. Using performance gap analysis, concrete recommendations are developed for the lead department of the marine along three dimensions: which departments to cooperate with, on what policy areas discussions should focus, and how Ireland performs in each area compared to a selection of peer countries. In particular, the article recommends cooperation with nine other departments on fifteen policy issues. Relative to peers, Ireland is ranked amongst sustainability “leaders” on three of these issues and amongst “laggards” on nine issues. The proposed procedure, which has wide application (to other countries and sectors) as a starting point for integrated policymaking, can help to raise awareness among policymakers of outcomes in linked policy areas and enable dialogue between ministries on coherent policies to address interrelated gaps in sustainability.