Over time, environmental policy has developed numerous different (sub-) fields. The amount of adopted objectives and instruments for their implementation is rising. As a consequence, the risk in-creases of contradictions and conflicts between different environmental fields of action as well as dif-ferent levels of government. Observers point to more and more inconsistencies within the sphere of environmental policy. For instance, policy-makers on the one hand encourage energetic restorations and on the other hand call for a reduction of material use. On the one hand, fossil fuels shall be sub-stituted by renewable resources such as biomass; on the other hand, ecosystems are to be preserved. Ensuring the coherence of policy objectives and instruments is a permanent challenge for environ-mental policy. It requires a good overview of the different fields of action, policy objectives, policy instruments, their effects and interactions. Such knowledge cannot be provided by a single person or organizational unit but is distributed among many experts and networks. The study at hand presents an approach for analysing and ensuring the coherence of environmental policy. It is an output of the research project “Examining the coherence of environmental policy ob-jectives and instruments for the purpose of environmental reporting” which was commissioned within the Environmental Research Plan (UFOPLAN). The developed approach can be used in the context of formulating, evaluating, reporting and com-municating environmental policy. It is based on a Wiki platform that makes data on environmental policy objectives easily accessible. Interactions between policy objectives are identified through the analysis of causal chains (causal chain analysis): policy objectives are implemented by means of pol-icy instruments which trigger (intended or unintended) changes in the behaviour of actors such as companies, households etc.. These behavioural changes may not only affect the initial environmental problem, but also other problems – by mitigating (synergy) or reinforcing (conflict) the causes of these other problems. In the “Coherence Wiki”, this information is presented in a schematised form. The analysis of the collected data shows that the objectives of German environmental policy are highly interrelated. Conflicts and synergies exist between the objectives and instruments of different policy sub-fields. The developed method also allows forecasting the coherence of potential new ob-jectives and instruments. The approach is hence particularly apt to support the development of new environmental policy strategies.
