How can Sustainable Development Goals be ‘mainstreamed’ in the EU’s Better Regulation Agenda? CEPS Policy Insights No 2017/12, March 2017

The European Commission recently announced its intention to mainstream the Sustainable Development Goals in its policy process, as part of its approach to implement the 2030 Agenda. This explicitly involves the EU's better regulation agenda, but the current tools and methods used in both ex ante impact assessment and ex post policy evaluation would need to be adapted to link better regulation with SDGs more effectively. More generally, this would also mean that the better regulation agenda becomes an instrument for policy coherence in EU public policy, and not only an instrument for efficiency. In this paper, the author reflects on the changes that would be needed in governance and better regulation methods, and in the European Semester and Cohesion policy. He proposes a five-phase transition towards a policy process that is fully geared to sustainable development