Ministries of Finance and Economy and Prime Minister Offices, for example, are driving change in most OECD countries. A complementary challenge is how to ensure the coherence of subsequent policies. Examine how the changes to policymaking and policy delivery mechanisms that are necessary for sustainable development will drive changes in the governance apparatus as a whole. The combination of broad and sometimes ill-defined issues with a multitude of actors and competing interests suggests that neither authoritarian solutions nor loose consensus may achieve effective decisions. Innovative ways of making choices and trade-offs will be highlighted, as well as their foreseeable consequences in terms of government decisionmaking.
Sustainable development is a very broad and complex set of issues.
PUMA highlights promising practices to facilitate decisionmakers' choices. PUMA is helping investigate this field of public policy. It is considering both national and global challenges, and looking at how policies initiated are translated into concrete action. This includes policy formulation within specific bodies and commissions and the legislature. PUMA is considering how to monitor sustainable development policies and how to deal with necessary trade-offs among different sectoral interests.