Methodology for the assessment of policy coherence in the area of non-energy mineral resources

Policy coherence has become an important objective of policy making in the EU and its member states. Its growing importance stems from the increasing number of interconnections between economic, social and environmental policies (Nilsson et al. 2012; Sorrell et al. 2003) that are an inevitable result of today's complex regulatory environment. This interconnectedness can either lead to synergies be-tween policy instruments that reinforce each other or to conflicts between policy instruments that block or even cancel each other out. Such interactions need to be taken into account during policy design, which should aim to avoid conflicts and increase the coherence of the overall policy space as much as possible, so as to reach "the synergic and systematic support towards the achievement of common objectives within and across individual policies"" (Den Hertog, Stross 2012, p. 4). There has only been very limited research on how interactions between policy instruments directly affect targeted stakeholders and how behavioral changes of these stakeholders can affect other stakeholders (Tuerk et al. 2012). Furthermore, research on interactions between environmental policies has focused primarily on climate and energy policies to date (Tuerk et al. 2012; Sorrell et al. 2003). Since a number of new political strategies and programs for non-energy mineral resources have been adopted both in Germany and on the EU level in the last few years, an analysis of this policy sector presents a valuable opportunity to advance the methodology on policy interactions. We therefore want to adapt parts of the analytical frameworks of two prior EU projects - APRAISE and INTERACT - to create a methodology that allows us to identify possible policy interactions between the policy instruments mentioned in the German Raw Materials Strategy (BMWi 2010), the German Resource Efficiency Program (BMU 2012) and the Strategy Paper Extractive Resources in German Development Cooperation (BMZ 2011). The overall objective of this methodological approach is to enhance our understanding of how policy interactions work, while at the same time assessing the policy coherence in the German non-energy mineral resources sector and identifying possible opportunities for improvement.