Translation Dynamics in Public Policy and Governance: A Replicable Method for Observing How Concepts Become Decision Criteria in European Programmes (Recovery and Resilience Facility, Galileo, Erasmus+)

Tagline: How EU programmes translate policy intent into decision criteria—evidence from the Recovery and Resilience Facility, Galileo, and Erasmus+.

Paper Description: How does policy intent become the criteria on which decisions are made? This paper examines how concepts introduced in European Union regulations are translated into the rules, indicators, and verification signals that govern allocation and evaluation in practice. Using three programmes—the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), Galileo, and Erasmus+—the paper shows that institutional meaning does not remain stable as it moves across governance artefacts; instead, it is systematically reformulated into decision-relevant forms.

The paper develops a minimal, rule-based, and replicable procedure for tracing how concepts move from founding articulation into structuring mechanisms and decision signals. A small set of semantic anchors is followed across publicly available artefacts (regulations, programme structures, and reporting layers), allowing translation dynamics to be observed directly from governance artefacts. Institutions do not act on declared purpose, but on its translated representations embedded in decision criteria, metrics, and verification signals.

The analysis demonstrates that translation is structured and traceable, not incidental, and that differences across programmes reflect governance architecture, not implementation failure. Translation coherence and drift can be observed and compared systematically. The contribution is methodological and empirical: a replicable approach for observing translation dynamics in institutional systems, a way to analyse how meaning becomes visible, comparable, and actionable, and a foundation for studying translation coherence and drift across governance contexts.

Programme Description: The Coherence Programme examines how institutional decision systems maintain—or lose—fidelity to declared intent under conditions of complexity, scale, optimization pressure, and delayed feedback. The programme models governance as a translation architecture. Using the Operating Spine, it traces how purpose moves through Capabilities, Value Drivers, Strategy, Portfolio, and Signals, becoming progressively encoded into measurable criteria and allocative rules. At the interfaces between these layers, translation drift, coherence, and corrective intervention can be analyzed structurally. Across its papers, the programme establishes translation traceability as a foundational concern of modern governance. The research applies to public institutions, capital allocation systems, portfolio governance, and AI-mediated decision environments—where the durability of decision rules shapes institutional reliability over time.

Programme citation: When referencing the research programme as a whole, please cite the entry paper: Mertens, R. E. U. (2026). The Coherence Programme: A Conceptual Overview and Entry Point to the Research Programme. This paper serves as the conceptual overview and entry point to the programme.
Supporting materials and programme documentation are available via the Coherence Programme OSF repository. 
Programme website: https://thecoherenceprogramme.org

Version 1.00: First public release.