The Rise of Policy Coherence for Development: A Multi-Causal Approach

In recent years policy coherence for development (PCD) has become a key principle in international development debates, and it is likely to become even more relevant in the discussions on the post-2015 sustainable development goals. This article addresses the rise of PCD on the Western donors’ aid agendas. Although the concept had already appeared in the work of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in the early 1990s, it was not until 2007 that PCD became one of the Organisation’s key priorities. We adopt a complexity-sensitive perspective, involving a process-tracing analysis and a multi-causal explanatory framework. We argue that the rise of PCD is not as contingent as it looks. While actors such as the EU, the DAC and the OECD Secretariat were the ‘active causes’ of the rise of PCD, it is equally important to look at the underlying ‘constitutive causes’ that enabled policy coherence to thrive.