ABSTRACT
The concept of coherence may be a new term in the study of policy, as Paul Hoebink notes in a recent review of challenges to development co-operation in the contemporary setting (Hoebink, this volume, Ch. 10). It does not yet have a place in the literature as do more established terms such as co-ordination or control. It is significant too that it has emerged as a professional and political concern not in the United States but in Europe, reflecting a difference between the two places in terms of how politics is being conducted. In the pluralist political system of the United States, coherence is, if not anathema, nonetheless a peripheral matter. In Europe with its long tradition of democratic corporatism, however, coherence is both a practical and intellectual concern.
