Environmental mainstreaming and policy coherence: essential policy tools to link international agreements with national development—a case study of the Caribbean region

© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media DordrechtThe 2030 agenda for sustainable development adopted in September 2015 advocates for a balanced integration of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. Existing multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) can provide guidance for policy-makers to promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, within safe ecological limits. This paper presents a practical approach to mainstream international obligations of MEAs with national development priorities and strategies. It identifies pathways of policy coherence from national strategies to specific instruments and indicators to advance implementation of MEAs and help counties to fulfill agreed obligations. The approach is grounded in the driving forces–pressure–state–impact–response (DPSIR) framework, and it was applied in two national and two regional case studies in the Caribbean. The outcomes from the case studies show that mainstreaming rate of MEAs is low, and linkages across multiple MEAs are rarely considered. The DPSIR framework was useful for addressing national development priorities and those of MEAs in tandem, through adopting a cross-sectoral, multistakeholder perspective. The research shows that addressing environmental degradation and improving MEAs’ implementation requires that international and regional agencies identify linkages among MEAs to assist in creating policy coherence to ensure their integration into national strategies by connecting with policies and strategies in tandem implementation of MEAs for national policy-makers to work with.