Politics and Governance for Co-Benefits

Achieving co-benefits places the focus on politics and governance. This chapter presents two basic frameworks for identifying opportunities to make successful policy for co-benefits. One is for addressing the problem of change within government, in the framework commonly used by advocates of intersectoral policy. We adopt a framework that can clearly identify key dynamics and opportunities for the construction of cross-cutting policies, as well as the areas in which, under current circumstances, progress is likely to be limited and advocates might find themselves frustrated or defending their achievements against attack. The second approach to analyzing politics and the possibility of action is grounded in the analysis of agenda-setting, which has been profitably applied to the area of intersectoral policy for health. In both cases, these are basic analytic frameworks for understanding which action is likely to be effective, in order to improve the likelihood that proposals for achieving co-benefits do achieve their potential benefits.