Policy Coherence in Climate Governance: A Systematic Review of Empirical Research

Abstract

Policy coherence has become a central principle in climate and development governance, particularly following the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This article presents a systematic review of 78 peer‐reviewed empirical studies published between 2005 and 2024, examining how policy coherence is conceptualized, operationalized, and explained in climate governance research. The review finds a field consolidated around a single conceptual framing: policy integration accounts for two‐thirds of the corpus and for every study published before 2015, while alignment‐oriented, sustainable development, and normative framings remain marginal. Empirical coverage is concentrated in Europe, which supplies nearly half of all studies, and methodologically narrow—four‐fifths of studies are wholly qualitative, three‐fifths analyze a single case, and three use cross‐national data. Synthesizing explanatory factors, the review shows that political and normative drivers of coherence are widely identified but seldom analyzed: 83% of studies attribute coherence outcomes to ideational factors, while two conduct discourse analysis. The clearest dimension‐specific pattern concerns economic and donor‐related factors, which are distinctively associated with vertical coherence across governance levels and strongly regionally structured—studies in Global South contexts make this link in 76% of cases against 36% of European and North American studies. Where external finance shapes national policy systems, coherence follows the flow of funding rather than the architecture of planning. These patterns follow from where and how coherence has been studied. The article concludes by outlining directions for more analytically direct, regionally inclusive and politically attentive research on policy coherence in climate governance.