This framework analytically delineates and operationalizes, in policy and programmatic terms, the inclusive development and inclusive policy agendas.

The tool is designed for the benefit of policy practitioners – a mixed audience of decision and policy makers, knowledge and data producers, and rights-holder groups. It will assist them by framing the upstream policy thinking and by supporting analysis and design of more inclusive, equity-weighed and SDG-oriented policies.

Key Messages

• Core of the 2030 Agenda: The SDGs come with a path-breaking global commitment to inclusive development and the associated policy agenda. The 2030 Agenda is premised on such a change. Goals 10 and 16 are entirely dedicated to inclusive societies and the reduction of inequalities. Other four Goals are embedded in inclusiveness.
• Pending tasks: Despite their strength at the discourse level, inclusive development and inclusive policy these are evolving agendas that remain largely under-analysed and non-operationalized in policy and programmatic terms. These tasks are pending but urgent under the SDGs.
• Avoiding empty use of the terms: As a mutation of social exclusion and inclusion, inclusive social development is to be grounded in the frameworks of the original concepts. The work on its operationalization through the inclusive policy agenda is to follow the same trail.
• Means and ends: Inclusive policy is concerned with adequate inclusion of all parties in the process of policy design and delivery and, at the same time, with producing the outcome of inclusion. Put simply, it is inclusive in means and ends. Both concerns count equally. 
• Portfolio of interventions: Inclusive policy is not a sectoral intervention. No standalone policy can achieve inclusion. It is brought about through a system or a portfolio of policy interventions that operate at once and in an integrated manner along the social, economic, political, civic and cultural axes.
• Transformative: This policy agenda is transformative in nature. It entails, as such, revision of the current modes of policy analysis, design and delivery at all levels.
• Inclusive policy markers: From ample yet dispersed evidence coming from around the world, a set of inclusive policy markers can be derived. Using these markers offers quality- and process-related safeguards to ensure that policies are more inclusive,  equity-weighed and SDG-oriented. As inclusive development itself, the markers are not sectoral. They are, rather, transversal and applicable to multiple sectoral policies.