Luxembourg for two years underwent an assessment by the OECD, which concluded that there is a high political commitment to sustainable development goals but that government entities need to work better together Photo: Matic Zorman / Maison Moderne

Luxembourg for two years underwent an assessment by the OECD, which concluded that there is a high political commitment to sustainable development goals but that government entities need to work better together Photo: Matic Zorman / Maison Moderne

The OECD in a report published by the Luxembourg government on Monday has urged authorities to work more closely together in achieving sustainable development goals and promoting sustained commitments beyond election cycles.

The Paris-based organisation over two years carried out an institutional review to assess mechanisms and capacities for Luxembourg to deliver on sustainable development goals (SDGs) at home and abroad with coherent policies.

“Luxembourg benefits from high political commitment to SDGs,” the report said but also recommended more investment in capacity building across governmental bodies and institutions on how to implement a sustainability check.

The sustainability check, or Nohaltegkeetscheck, is already applied to some policy areas--allowing political decisions to be checked for their impact, for example on the environment. The OECD in its assessment endorsed its adoption as a mandatory tool, saying it “could prove effective for more systematically taking into account long-term impacts of draft laws and regulations as well as policy proposals.”

But the OECD said more should already be done to familiarise officials with this new tool and recommended setting up a central advisory body to oversee the quality of the checks.

The institutional review is a result of desk research, questionnaires, interviews, self-assessment exercises and workshops hosted with different ministries, inter-ministerial bodies and NGOs between June 2020 and April 2022.

It is based around three pillars and eight guiding principles of the OECD’s recommendations on policy coherence for sustainable development, which aim to “equip policy-makers and key stakeholders with the necessary institutional mechanism and policy tools to address economic, social and environmental priorities in an integrated matter.”

The three pillars are commitment, vision and leadership, mechanisms for policy interaction across sectors, actors and government levels, and tools to anticipate assess and address domestic, transboundary and long-term impacts of policies.

In all of these, the sustainability check was seen as a useful tool if properly implemented.

The check forms part of a national sustainability plan, which the OECD also welcomed. But it said “limited enforceability” as well as “insufficient expertise of policy makers on the topic, legal and political framework as well as capacity of human resources” undermine commitments to policy coherence beyond election cycles.

The review recommended steps for government entities to work more closely together, saying that “often strategies that relate to a same SDG are split across multiple ministries and have been developed in silos.”

It said more participative methods--citing the citizens’ climate council or the Luxembourg in Transition project--could also help keep the public engaged between elections, and urged for greater involvement, for example of the University of Luxembourg but also private stakeholders.