Using CIB for policy design

Environmental governance and in particular sustainability transformations are ridden with conflicts between multiple goals, e.g., between economic, social, nature conservation and climate protection related goals. It is an urgent question, how to achieve a coherent governance of sustainable development, and how to seize synergies and avoid trade-offs between the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN Agenda 2030. On the level of policies to reach these goals, it is an open question how to design policies (strategies, instruments and measures) within, between and across sectors and levels, that support each other or at least interfere as little as possible with each other. We present a new application of cross-impact balances (CIB) (Weimer-Jehle 2006), namely as a methodology for policy-interaction modeling to design and evaluate policy mixes (ex post and ex ante). We have developed and tested the approach in two projects on water and land use governance respectively. We found that the methodology provides easy operationalizations for synergy and consistency, and allows assessing sustainability effects and robustness of policy mixes, too. Sustainability effects are assessed by considering, how policies perform regarding different sustainability criteria, implemented as passive factors into the matrix. The methodology helps to understand the trade-offs of status quo policy mixes and to design alternative mixes, which better seize synergies and reduce trade-offs. We consider the approach particularly useful to better address interrelations between SDGs and to contribute to a more coherent governance of sustainability transformations. We would also like to present two future applications, a) systematically combining CIB policy design (Kosow et al. 2022) with CIB context scenarios (Weimer-Jehle et al. 2020) and b) strengthening the focus on actors’ decisions and strategies behind policy choices.