A look at the history of the ESDN reveals that ESDN Workshops have played a prominent role in facilitating networking between European SD practitioners and policy advisors. This section of the website provides a one-stop-shop documentation of all ESDN Workshops so far. Please click on one of the Workshops for more details:
The 4th ESDN Workshop took place on 3-4 November 2009 in Brussels, Belgium. The workshop was entitled "New Driver for Sustainable Development Strategies - The Power of Smart Linkages"
The integration of various sectoral policies (horizontal policy integration) lies at the heart of the sustainable development concept. In practice, however, the challenges of integrating and coordinating different sectoral policies are vivid and seem to increase in the context of complex decision structures and established political-administrative cultures. Most government ministries and their related administrations are organised along sectoral policies and cross-sectoral coordination is often difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, horizontal policy integration needs to be comprehensively addressed and mechanisms need to be established if we want to achieve sustainable development on the European and Member States level. The importance and challenge of the topic for the success of sustainable development caused the ESDN Steering Group to organise an ESDN Workshop in order to discuss good practices of horizontal policy integration, to exchange information and experiences and, ultimately, to provide guidance on how to move towards better policy coordination and integration in the governance of sustainable development.
The workshop consisted of three parts: The first part dealt with inter-ministerial mechanisms at the political level in order to investigate how these institutional mechanisms foster horizontal policy integration by establishing a better coordination for sustainable development between different government ministries. The second looked into mechanisms that link legislative and executive arenas. By providing an overview of parliamentary committees in selected EU Member States, it was discussed how legislative mechanisms can support the implementation of sustainable development strategies and policies. The third part of the workshop focussed on auditing and evaluation schemes that focus on how well sustainable development strategies and policies are implemented on the ground.
Session 1: Inter‐ministerial mechanisms at the political level
Germany: State Secretaries’ Committee for Sustainable Development
Session 2: Mechanisms that link legislative and executive arenas
UK: Environmental Audit Committee in the UK Parliament
Gordon Clarke: Clerk of the Environmental Audit Committee, United Kingdom
Session 3: Auditing and evaluation schemes
Austria: Sustainability Auditing
Heinrich Lang: Austrian Court of Auditors
Panel discussion on auditing and evaluation schemes
Nadine Gouzée: Belgian Federal Planning Bureau – Evaluation of policies for Sustainable Development
