Religious Policy and Sustainable Development Goals: Integrating Faith-Based Governance into Public Policy

Religious actors increasingly participate in sustainable development, yet their involvement in public policy remains uneven across organizational forms, policy sectors, and institutional settings. This study examines how religious policy can structure the integration of faith-based governance into Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) implementation while maintaining inclusion, public accountability, and state neutrality. Using a qualitative document-based design, the study combines a structured review of relevant literature with thematic and comparative conceptual analysis of religious actors, governance arrangements, policy participation, and development practices. The analysis identified four interconnected dimensions of faith-based governance is norms, dialogue, institutions, and practice. Religious norms provide moral resources related to solidarity, dignity, justice, peace, and environmental responsibility, while dialogue facilitates interaction among religious, governmental, civil-society, and scientific actors. Institutional arrangements shape representation, coordination, participation, monitoring, and accountability, whereas practice reflects faith-based engagement across welfare, education, health, humanitarian assistance, peacebuilding, advocacy, and environmental action. The findings also reveal an important distinction between institutional visibility and community proximity, as formal faith-based organizations tend to have greater policy access while local and informal actors often possess stronger community embeddedness but weaker formal representation. The study conceptualizes faith-based governance as a context-dependent form of public governance in which religious participation is shaped by organizational capacity, institutional arrangements, representation, and accountability safeguards. This framework provides a basis for understanding how religious policy can organize faith-based participation in SDG-related public policy without assuming uniform benefits or causal effects across contexts.