In 2015 alone, three international climate and sustainability policy agendas were negotiated: the Paris Agreement, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. The concerns of the three agendas are deeply interconnected. Hence, for a successful implementation it is crucial to elaborate options for a joint implementation of the agendas. The aim of the FFU-project “Joint implementation of the 2030 Agenda/SDGs and the Paris Agreement” was to examine potentials for synergies and options for managing possible conflicts of a joint implementation.

In this context, two publications were released recently:

The conceptual and analytical paper deals with shaping policy integration and what policy integration can mean with respect to the global agendas. To this end, the paper firstly elaborates conceptual aspects (i.a. distinct understandings and goals of policy integration, the evolution of policy integration research, costs and benefits of policy integration, leverage points for policy integration) and builds on existing literature on the assessment of policy integration. Secondly, factors are identified appearing as promotive drivers for policy integration. Thirdly, with regard to a specific country selection the paper analyzes good practices of climate and sustainability policy integration on the one hand, and the relevant drivers for a more detailed country selection on the other hand. Finally, the paper identifies factors that can affect the transfer of existing practices. Against this background, processes of an integrated implementation of the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda in Germany are being discussed.

Building on these insides, a short discussion paper elaborates integrated implementation of transformative agendas and optimizing policy integration. The analysis of empirical results reveals that in-depth policy integration is usually lacking. Considering the faced shortcomings, the paper concludes with four factors contributing to a deepened integration in practice: political leadership, civic participation, science, and sustainable finance. The detailed empirical analysis can be found in the aforementioned analytical paper.