Policy Coherence for Development: Five Challenges

‘Policy Coherence for Development’ (PCD) seeks to ensure that non-aid public policies are consistent with a government’s international development goals. In the light of a number of years of PCD reviews and institutional reforms at both EU and member state level, this paper reflects on the dynamics of the PCD policy environment and discusses five challenges for the PCD policy agenda. These include the opposing interests of domestic and development constituencies, conflicts between development objectives themselves, disagreements between experts on what ‘good’ development policy is, difficulties in identifying the true development interest of developing countries, and the growing heterogeneity between and within developing countries. While the challenges discussed in this paper have general relevance, we draw on EU and Irish policies to illustrate the arguments. We conclude with a series of recommendations on how these challenges might be addressed and how to make the PCD agenda more effective.Policy Coherence for Development, European Trade and Agriculture Policy, Development Policy, Millennium Development Goals

The effect of perceptual availability and prior discourse on young children's use of referring expressions.

Choosing appropriate referring expressions requires assessing whether a referent is “available” to the addressee either perceptually or through discourse. In Study 1, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds, but not 2-year-olds, chose different referring expressions (noun vs. pronoun) depending on whether their addressee could see the intended referent or not. In Study 2, in more neutral discourse contexts than previous studies, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds clearly differed in their use of referring expressions according to whether their addressee had already mentioned a referent. Moreover, 2-yearolds responded with more naming constructions when the referent had not been mentioned previously. This suggests that, despite early social–cognitive developments, (a) it takes time tomaster the given/new contrast linguistically, and (b) children understand the contrast earlier based on discourse, rather than perceptual context