Issue 16: Missions, impossible?

Plus, greater humility in public consultation, how to sequence your carrots and sticks, and the Halloween Massacre

This month’s Policycraft brings together a set of commentaries and resources on a single question: why is mission-oriented government so hard to do well?

I assume, like me, many of you read Mariana Mazzucato’s work on mission-oriented government and then watched it take over the last decade of public administration discourse. The idea of organizing government around big, cross-cutting missions has captured the imagination of reformers in the UK, the EU, Korea, Sweden, and beyond. The theory, in its most basic form, is compelling: pick an ambitious goal, align policy and resources across departments, and hold everyone accountable to outcomes. But how has the theory worked in practice?

This month’s syllabus digs into why the gap between mission theory and mission practice remains stubbornly wide, while also inspiring cautious optimism from the evidence starting to emerge from real-world experiments. Whether you’re a mission skeptic or a mission evangelist (or somewhere in between), there’s something here for you.

(Those of you who are aware of how Policycraft pays the bills may be curious about my thoughts on Mazzucato’s The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies. That commentary is available at the “Buy Me a Coffee Next Time You’re In Toronto” subscriber tier.)

THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS

💻 Why mission government failed, Joe Hill, Re:State

The UK Labour government’s experiment with mission-oriented government, heavily influenced by Mariana Mazzucato’s work, was supposed to be the template for a new kind of governing. Joe Hill’s post-mortem asks what went wrong. At the heart of his argument is what he calls “institutional romanticism”: the assumption that government can operate as a single purposeful actor when, in practice, it is a federation of small groups often working at cross-purposes. Government bodies, Hill argues, optimize for process, not outcomes, and punish failure far more readily than they reward success. The internal politics, inertia, and risk-aversion that characterize large bureaucracies were treated by Labour as obstacles to be overcome by sheer ambition rather than as design constraints to be worked around. Does this sound (heavy sigh) familiar to anyone?

Perhaps Hill’s most thought-provoking point is that there is no obvious successor to New Public Management as a governing paradigm. Mission-oriented government could have been that successor, but has struggled to translate its theoretical appeal into institutional change. If missions are not the answer, does the question of how to organize government for outcomes rather than outputs remain wide open?

💻 Unfit for uncertainty: Rethinking decision-making for missions and Beyond the waterfall state: Why missions need a different decision-making architecture, Jack Strachan, CivicWorks

This two-part analysis from Jack Strachan at CivicWorks examines how the wrong decision-making frameworks actively undermine mission-oriented government. The first piece argues that governments still rely on decision logics designed for predictable, linear problems; logics wholly inadequate for the extreme uncertainty that marks 21st-century policymaking. Essentially, when you attempt to run complex, adaptive challenges through machinery built for stability, the machinery produces the wrong answers.

The second piece discusses the concept of the “waterfall state,” a term that will resonate with anyone who has watched a policy move through sequential approval gates that strip out all the adaptive qualities it needs to survive contact with reality. The architecture of government decision-making, Strachan argues, needs to be rebuilt from first principles if missions are to stand any chance. Both pieces are chock full of links to deeper and broader thinking on the ideas raised; it’s worth dramatically slowing down your browser with tabs for all that extended reading.

💻 Challenges and opportunities of mission-oriented innovation policy in Korea and Governance of ecosystem-driven missions, OECD

Want something more optimistic, more specific, and more hands-on? The OECD has been diving deep into mission-oriented government, collecting evidence from around the world and attempting to capture best practices (and common failures). The Korea report examines how one of the world’s most coordinated innovation systems has adapted mission-oriented approaches, building on a long history of centralized science and technology policy coordination. Korea’s experience shows both the promise and the limitations: strong institutional frameworks can make mission alignment easier, but even there, simplifying prioritization across government and connecting societal missions to existing innovation infrastructure remain major challenges.

The Sweden report, meanwhile, “stress-tests” the governance of five distinct ecosystem-driven missions, covering everything from sustainable metals to public sector health reform. It’s a valuable look at what mission governance actually means when you get past the theory and into the messy work of coordinating across agencies, sectors, and stakeholders. For anyone wanting to move from “missions sound great in principle” to “here’s how they work (and don’t) in practice,” both reports are worth your time.

🎙️ Ingredients for mission-oriented government, GovMaker Podcast

To close out the missions theme, check out this podcast interview from a UK public servant Sarah Doyle, who has been in the belly of the mission-oriented beast and has lots to share. (She is also a veteran of our very own MaRS Discovery District!) The conversation covers the practical ingredients required for mission-oriented work to actually function inside government, including what kinds of teams, mandates, and institutional support make the difference between a mission that generates real momentum and one that becomes another strategy document gathering dust. As a bonus, she discusses a recurring theme on Policycraft: the role of storytelling within policymaking, and why the narrative a government tells itself about a mission matters as much as the formal governance architecture around it.

🎓 Carrot first, stick second? Environmental policy-mix sequencing and green technologies, Kinga B. Tchorzewska, Pablo del Río, Jose Garcia-Quevedo, and Ester Martinez-Ros, Technological Forecasting and Social Change

Should we use tax credits or subsidies to incentivize behaviour? Why not both? Well, actually, this research suggests you should be careful about that. Using a panel database of Spanish firms’ green technology investments over a decade, the authors investigate whether the sequencing of different policy instruments matters for outcomes. It turns out, it does. Introducing subsidies (“carrots”) before environmental taxes (“sticks”) significantly boosts the adoption of eco-innovations, particularly for small and medium firms. Introducing sticks first and then carrots? No statistically significant effect on adoption. Perhaps most striking, tax credits and subsidies turn out to be substitutes rather than complements; using both doesn’t add value and may create substantial inefficiencies. The implications are clear: if you’re designing a policy mix, the order in which you introduce your instruments matters as much as the instruments themselves. One for the “implementation details matter” file.

💻 Practice notes on including citizens in the design process, Jack Strachan, CivicWorks

Let’s make it a hat trick for CivicWorks: I simply couldn’t let this humble and generous advice on how to better include citizens and their knowledge in your policymaking pass by unshared. Strachan offers field notes on trust, “participatory scaffolding”, and shared agency that avoid the typical top-down consultation framework approach in favour of something more honest. His first point reminds me of my work at the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, where visiting a local chamber always provided me with greater insight into a policy issue than any number of reports ever could.

💻 Inside the Halloween Massacre, David McLaughlin, Governance Matters

Fill your rocks glass and settle in for a tale of how to make good policy and good politics, from Policycraft’s former public service boss, David McLaughlin. In this recent piece from his newsletter, David shares all the behind-the-scenes drama, skullduggery, and measured policymaking that went into the Conservative government’s 2006 decision to kill income trusts, a move that was economically necessary but politically explosive. Come for a deeper understanding of the push and pull between political imperatives and policy rigour, stay for the cameo from a future Prime Minister.

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