Development policies and regulations must be situated within broader sustainable development goals if they are to be successful.
The European Union recognises that Policy Coherence for Development plays a key role in the agenda of fulfilling UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The EU made important progress in 2015 with the revision of the Commission Impact Assessment guidelines as part of the Better Regulation Package. They now include specific guidance and a tool box for analysing the potential impact of important EU policy initiatives on developing countries.
The EU’s private and public market actors are crucial to achieving development goals due to their high level of interaction with actors in emerging and developing economies. Comprehensive and ground-breaking research into the regulatory complexity of the EU private and public market actors’ impact on developing countries is required.
Our research advances the understanding of how development concerns can be integrated in the non-development policies and regulations concerning market actors, thereby contributing to greater Policy Coherence for Development. We will deepen the understanding of factors that enable or hinder development-friendly, environmentally and social sustainable trade in the context of the specific product life-cycles of ready-made garments and mobile phones.
We map the regulatory framework for European market actors on the international, EU, and Member States level. This is a complex and challenging task which is carried out with the support of the Sustainable Market Actors Network.
In 2019 we will have identified options and reforms that promote the market actors’ development-friendly choices where environmental, social and economic externalities in the global supply chains of products are internalised.
We will investigate other options and reforms that contribute to improved policy coherence between EU development goals and EU non-development policies and regulations. By the end of the project period, we will have recommendations for improved assessment of policy coherence for sustainable development. We will also in 2019 pinpoint issues that best can be dealt with on the international level or on the Member State level – or even by the market actors themselves.
