The growing importance the international community is giving to objectives such as poverty reduction, full employment, provision of decent work and reducing growing inequality has necessarily led to a greater demand on the coherence of policies pursued by national governments as well as by the multilateral system . The current practise of coherence is increasingly challenged for at least two reasons. Firstly, although the consensus about these newly formulated objectives has been large , the policy instruments and the coherence between these instruments leave still much to be desired as the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization has aptly pointed out. Secondly at national level policies are defined and implemented through sectoral and specialized departments and harmonization and coordinated through various mechanisms.
The World Commission in its 2004 report , in the light of the accepted shared objectives of decent work and employment creation , enlarged the then current notion of policy coherence between trade , aid and financial policies and added to it , the need for greater coherence between economic and social policies. The World Commission identified in particular weaknesses in global governance. “The normal pressures in national politics to strike a compromise based on a trade-off between competing economic, social and environmental goals are typically absent in the global context” (paragraph 352. Specific suggestions were made to moving forward in policy coherence. At the national level the Commission suggested regular national reviews of the social implications of economic, financial and trade policies. Policy Coherence Initiatives were suggested at the international level to progressively develop integrated proposals in order to balance economic, social and developmental policies.The need for policy coherence in global governance was a prominent them of many follow-up meetings to the World Commission’s report,. The ILO has taken a series of initiatives to address policy coherence in global policies. A Policy Coherence Initiative was launched on “Growth, Investment and Employment” together with the Bretton Woods institutions and other multilateral agencies (GB.298/WP/SDG/2). Until June 2007 meetings have taken place hosted by different agencies participating in the initiative, at which policies of those agencies relating to issues like flexicurity, financial openness, wage shares in national income, trade and employment , informality in Africa were discussed. The PCI has led to a greater and improved interaction between the senior officials of the different organizations on policies for decent work and employment and as such has also greatly eased negotiations in preparing for system wide declarations which have a bearing on globalization , decent work and employment .