Bond organised an online workshop on Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development (PCSD) on 30.9.2019
This session focused on developing national advocacy for PCD and PCSD, using tools from the Bond toolkit ‘Ensuring Policy Coherence in Sustainable Development’ (created for the CE4SD project). This toolkit was introduced.
Evert-Jan Brouwer, Political Adviser at Woord en Daad, Netherlands, then facilitated the rest of the session, in which participants explored the concepts of PCD and PCSD in practice and what they might mean for their activities at the national level; and how to use relevant advocacy tools.
Participants were broken into small teams that looked into PCD at the national level. In Slovenia we selected scholarships provided by the Slovenian government to students from ex-Yugoslavia as an (potential) example of incoherence. The issue is that the students do not necessarily go back to their home countries to participate in development thereof. They boost the number of foreign students enrolled at the University which benefits the University in terms of funding and international rating. The funds are also counted as part of Slovenian ODA, which is questionable, when the students do not participate in the development of their countries of origin.