Public Policies and Policy Coherence: Goals, Instruments and Target Populations

Public policies are a set of specific actions intended to solve concrete public problems. Given the specificity of the policy approach, its unit of analysis is the policy itself. This attribute may lead to a myopia problem: to focus on each public policy without studying the whole, or to believe that the set of public policies is, automatically, harmonious. Yet, a series of well-designed and implemented public policies is not equivalent to a set of complementary and self-reinforcing policies that solve complex public issues. In this paper, we analyze three levels of coherence for public policies: internal coherence (the causal theory), coherence among policies in the same policy domain, and coherence across policy domains. We show that internal coherence is not guarantee of external coherence. We use Mexican government programs to exemplify the consequence of incoherent policies.