This chapter underlines how the global climate mitigation governance framework relies on the successful implementation of national climate targets. It explains how national targets have been translated into legal and institutional frameworks, but finds that despite this progress, most countries are falling short of their existing commitments. At the same time, governments are facing calls to pledge even more ambitious emission reductions in order for international targets to be met. Facing this challenge, the chapter explores similarities between national climate targets and mission objectives, proposing a mission-oriented approach to strengthen governance arrangements to operationalise targets and drive further progress on climate action.
Harnessing Mission Governance to Achieve National Climate Targets
Abstract
The UN climate process has been remarkably successful at catalysing national goal setting and planning processes for climate change (Hale, 2024[1]). Yet, it has not been prescriptive in the sense that it imposes or even proposes any specific formulas or recipes in terms of how to realise the objectives laid out in the NDCs, instead leaving implementation decisions to national governments. As such, the Paris agreement has effectively created a multitude of sandboxes for different approaches to governance for reaching climate targets (see Box 2.1), in which countries are experimenting in creating laws and organisational structures. In part this allows for taking into account each states’ specific circumstances as countries tend to have “varieties of climate governance”, often path-dependent and marked by the interplay of national political institutions, international drivers, and bureaucratic structures (Dubash, 2021[2]).
Countries have primary responsibility for climate change mitigation. This organising principle first emerged in 2005, when the Kyoto Protocol came into force (Durand, 2012[3]). The Kyoto Protocol took a top-down approach, imposing binding emission reduction targets on 37 industrialised countries and the European Union. However, it was never ratified by the United States Congress, and its membership base further declined in 2010 when Japan did not renew its participation and in 2011 when Canada withdrew (Durand, 2012[3]). All three states critiqued the Protocol’s restrictive targets and limited (~30%) coverage of global emissions, the latter a consequence of not imposing binding targets on major emitter, but still-industrialising, countries India and China (Durand, 2012[3]). Overall, the Protocol failed to galvanise climate mitigation, while it did initiate the adoption of green growth policies in countries that participated (Grunewald and Martinez-Zarzoso, 2015[4]). A 2010 World Bank report found it “failed to substantially curb emissions, which have increased by 25% since Kyoto was negotiated” (World Bank, 2009[5]).
The 2015 Paris Agreement overcame stalled progress on climate mitigation by replacing the Kyoto Protocol’s top-down, binding targets with a bottom-up, voluntary system of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) (Durand, 2012[3]). Under the Paris Agreement, countries determine their own emission reduction targets in line with the Agreement’s goals, which are evaluated as part of a global stocktake every five years and strengthened thereafter. NDCs are not binding under international law, but their level of ambition and likelihood of achievement impacts states’ reputations and engages a sense of reciprocity. Overall, the Paris Agreement strengthened the principle of state-level responsibility for climate mitigation by giving states the agency to determine their own contributions to the global mitigation effort.
NDCs set the parameters for national and/or supranational climate action. For example, the European Union is delivering on its NDC through Fit for 55, a legislative package aimed at reducing net emissions by at least 55% by 2030, compared to 1990 levels (European Council, 2024[6]). Fit for 55 includes reforms to the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), a social climate fund, a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) and the Effort Sharing Regulation (ESR), a set of binding annual emissions targets for member states in sectors not covered by the EU ETS or the regulation on land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF). ESR targets are tailored to each country's specific economic capabilities, determined primarily by their GDP per capita, and are adjusted for cost-effectiveness (European Council, 2024[6]).
From Kyoto to Paris, an international order has emerged that places responsibility for climate mitigation at the nation state level. The global effort to combat climate change therefore relies largely on the successful implementation of national emission reduction targets.
Source: OECD based on (European Council, 2024[6]; Durand, 2012[3]).
New laws, policies and institutions have emerged to give effect to NDC targets. According to the OECD Climate Action Dashboard, 27 countries and the European Union, representing 16% of global emissions, have codified net-zero targets in domestic law (OECD, n.d.[7]). In 2023, the UNFCC reported that 48% of Parties indicated that they had integrated their NDC targets, goals and policies into national legislative, regulatory and planning processes (UNFCC, 2023[8]).
In the wake of the United Kingdom’s Climate Change Act of 2008, nearly 60 countries have introduced climate change framework laws, which “establish the strategic direction for national climate change policy and often the institutional arrangements for climate action too” (Averchenkova, Fankhauser and Finnegan, 2020[9]). Aside from codifying NDC and/or net-zero targets, these laws may:
Set, or require to be set, stepping-stone national emission reduction targets or budgets;
Set, or require to be set, sectoral emission reduction targets or budgets;
Require regular emission reduction plans;
Establish an independent climate change commission;
Require independent reports on progress towards emission reduction targets;
Require independent evaluations of emission reduction plans;
Establish Parliamentary reporting requirements;
Establish fiscal reporting requirements; and
Build-in a periodic legislative review process.
For example, New Zealand’s Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act of 2019 codifies a net-zero domestic emission reduction target, establishes a system of emission budgets, requires the Government to develop and implement Emission Reduction and National Adaptation Plans, and establishes an independent advisory and monitoring body, the Climate Change Commission (Ministry for the Environment, 2024[10]).
Countries have also, often as required under climate framework laws, begun publishing emission reduction plans, detailing the policies and actions needed to achieve national climate targets. The development and delivery of plans are often led by Environment or Climate Ministers and their departments but tend to require a substantial co-ordination effort across government (Kaur et al., 2023[11]). Cross-ministerial and cross-departmental boards have therefore emerged as a popular governance structure that can help elevate climate change as a ministerial/executive priority and improve access to the necessary policy, funding and resourcing levers needed to effect change. The United Kingdom, for example, allocates responsibility for climate mitigation policy to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, but has established a Cabinet Committee on Climate Change, chaired by the Prime Minister, to oversee climate decision-making (Climate Change committee, 2024[12]). Meanwhile, Ireland's Department of Environment, Climate and Communications is tasked with the design and development of its Climate Action Plans, but responsibility for the delivery of plans is centralised within the Department of the Taoiseach (equivalent to a Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet) and overseen by the cross-cutting Climate Action Delivery Board (Department of the Taoiseach, 2022[13])).
Independent climate councils are another rising trend in climate governance. The International Climate Councils Network (ICCN) has grown its membership to 25 climate councils from 20 countries and the EU since its launch at COP26 in 2021 (ICCN, 2024[14]).1 The role and functions of climate councils vary. Some, like Australia’s Climate Change Authority or Canada’s Net-Zero Advisory Body, perform an advisory role only. Others, like the Swedish Climate Policy Council (SCPC), perform broader monitoring and evaluation functions as well, producing independent reports on progress towards emission targets and/or evaluating emission reduction plans.
Overall, climate laws and legal frameworks, spurred by the widespread adoption of NDCs under the Paris Agreement, have developed rapidly around the world and have thus far proven robust to changes in government. Often supported and held to account by independent climate councils, they are encouraging significant, coordinated, whole-of-government efforts to plan and deliver climate policies. Yet, this progress will have to be sped up and strengthened significantly, if national and international global climate targets alike are to be met in the coming years.
Countries are not yet on track to achieve their targets
Despite widespread adoption of NDCs, and the rollout of novel climate governance arrangements, most countries are not on-track to meet their NDC targets. The OECD Climate Action Dashboard tracks countries’ progress, finding as of March 2024, that 110 countries have pledged a net-zero target, of which 95 are aiming for net-zero emissions by 2050 or before (OECD, 2024[15]). Net-zero NDC targets cover about 85% of global emissions (OECD, 2024[15]). Including all NDC targets brings this figure up to 88% (Net Zero Tracker, 2024[16]).
Figure 2.1 shows the difference (expressed as a percentage) between select OECD member and partner countries’ annual emissions and their 2030 NDCs. It emphasises the significant gap to delivering on targets for many countries, ranging from 5% for Argentina, to 57% for Iceland.
Note: Annual difference between GHG emissions and NDC 2030 target is calculated by subtracting target estimates from GHG emissions each year. A positive value in given year signifies that the country has emitted more than the 2030 target amount in its NDC.
Source: IPAC, Pizarro, R., et al. (2024), "GHG Emission Trends and Targets (GETT): Harmonised quantification methodology and indicators", OECD Environment Working Papers, No. 230, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/decef216-en; OECD, “Air emissions - Greenhouse gas emissions Inventories”, OECD Environment Statistics (database), https://doi.org/10.1787/data-00594-en.
The picture is similar in the European Union. Figure 2.2 shows the difference (expressed as a percentage) between EU countries’ Effort Sharing Regulation (ESR) emission reduction targets and their latest annual emissions in ESR sectors. All EU countries, bar one, are off-track to meet these targets.
Note: The European Union’s Effort Sharing Regulation (ESR) sets legally binding 2030 emissions reduction targets for each of its 27 Member States for sectors not covered by the EU Emission Trading System (ETS), namely domestic transport (excluding aviation), buildings, agriculture, waste and small industry. These non-ETS sectors are responsible for nearly 60% of the EU’s total emissions. The annual difference between ESR sector emissions and targets is calculated by subtracting the target from the emissions. A positive value means the country emitted more than the target, while a negative value means it emitted less.
Source: EEA, "Greenhouse gas emissions under the Effort Sharing Decision", EEA Datahub (database); IPAC, Pizarro, R., et al. (2024), "GHG Emission Trends and Targets (GETT): Harmonised quantification methodology and indicators", OECD Environment Working Papers, No. 230, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/decef216-en; OECD, “Air emissions - Greenhouse gas emissions Inventories”, OECD Environment Statistics (database), https://doi.org/10.1787/data-00594-en.
While countries have committed to NDCs and other climate targets, few have been able to translate these commitments into adequate action. A 2023 report on the State of Climate Action indicates that global and national progress is off track to meet 2030 targets for 41 out of 42 assessed indicators (Boehm et al., 2023[17]).
Furthermore, the Paris Agreement's first Global Stocktake in 2023 found that global emissions are not consistent with pathways to achieve the Agreement’s goal of limiting temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels (UN, 2024[18]). Notably, even the full implementation of existing Nationally Determined Contributions will be insufficient to meet the 1.5°C target. Experts at the United Nations Framework for Climate Change urged countries to increase the ambition of their NDCs in line with net-zero by 2050 and found that “urgent action and support are needed to ramp up implementation of domestic mitigation measures by realizing opportunities across all sectors and systems” (UN, 2024[18]). Increased climate ambition for the 2025-2030 period and beyond will have to be reflected in the next round of NDCs, which will be reviewed and submitted by countries ahead of COP30 in 2025 (Haut Conseil pour le Climat, 2024[19]).
In sum, widespread adoption of NDCs under the Paris Agreement prompted a rapid rollout of new climate governance arrangements. Yet most countries are not on-track to achieve their NDC targets, and there is a small window for adjustment prior to the first NDC deadlines in 2030. A clear international call to raise the ambition of NDC targets in line with the Paris Agreement's goals only increases the challenge. It is this an opportune moment for national policy makers, and the international community at large, to reflect on the effectiveness of climate governance arrangements, and to consider whether, and if so how, they could be strengthened to better enable efforts to meet climate mitigation objectives. Mission as a policy instrument could be a way to do that.
The differentiating factor between traditional policy approaches and missions are that mission take their starting point in the set objective, and from there iteratively craft and implement the governance, structure, coalitions, policies. They are thus a way to address challenges characterised by high degrees of uncertainty, to which one does not have prescribed solutions. This in turn allows for taking novel approaches to governance, institutions, and policy deployment, as well as better harness experiment, innovation, and learning. As noted by Hale, goal-setting plays a key role in enabling governance that is both experimental (testing diverse policy approaches across different contexts, allowing for learning and adaptation) and catalytic (triggering and accelerating transformative change by strategically intervening at key leverage points) (Hale, 2024[1]).
Thus, ambitious policy objectives define, and lie at the very core of, the mission concept. Ideally (although so is not always the case in practice) such ‘mission statements’ align with the ‘SMART’ criteria for effective goal setting popular in management theory; namely that targets be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (Box 2.2).
By these above criteria, NDCs, and national climate targets more broadly, are by all intents and purposes missions. These targets clearly embody bold, salient, and societally relevant objectives by addressing one of humanity’s greatest challenges, one that has direct and consequential impacts on society and individuals alike.
The NDCs set a clear direction through targeted, measurable, and time-bound overarching goals – typically setting greenhouse gas emission reduction targets for 2030, such as the European Union's goal to cut emissions by at least 55% below 1990 levels (European Commission, 2024[20]). While NDCs vary significantly in their level of detail and specificity across countries, they often include quantifiable sector-specific targets in areas like renewable energy adoption or forest conservation.
NDCs are designed to be ambitious yet achievable, grounded in scientific assessments of climate change impacts and mitigation pathways, particularly drawing on reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These science-based targets are then tailored to each country's unique circumstances, considering factors such as economic structure, energy mix, and technological capabilities, to ensure they are realistic within the national context while still contributing to global climate goals.
Climate targets also necessitate cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral action, spanning areas from energy to agriculture and involving diverse stakeholders from all parts of the economy and society.
Importantly, NDCs do not have specific solution pathways, but allow for multiple, bottom-up solutions, encouraging innovation across various technological and policy pathways to meet targets. For instance, countries may pursue a mix of strategies such as carbon pricing, energy efficiency standards, and nature-based solutions to meet their targets. As such, national climate targets invite for new governance strategies that can offer an explorative and systemic approach to the complex challenge of climate change mitigation, moving beyond traditional silo-bound policymaking.
In sum, NDCs and national climate targets effectively function as broad missions, providing clear goalposts but flexible pathways for whole-of-economy and societal transitions, in order to contribute to the global climate objectives.
However, as will be explored in the next section, the sheer scale of the challenge of climate mitigation also represents limitations for the mission approach, which is most adapted to more narrowly defined problems with more manageable sets of stakeholders. Therefore, operationalising climate targets benefit more from the principles of mission governance, which have the added benefit of enabling effective missions targeting the discrete objectives or sub-targets that typically underpin NDCs.
Mazzucato and Dibb (2019[21]) set out five criteria for the development of missions, stating that they should:
Be bold, inspirational with wide societal relevance: Missions should engage the public. They should make clear that through ambitious, bold action, solutions will be developed that will have an impact on people’s daily lives.
Set a clear direction – targeted, measurable, and time-bound: Missions need to be very clearly framed. While enabling long-term investments, they need a specific target that can either be formulated in binary ways (as clearly as whether man has reached the Moon and returned back safely) or quantified (as clearly as whether a certain percentage reduction in carbon emissions against a baseline has been reached across manufacturing).
Be ambitious but realistic: Mission objectives should be set in an ambitious manner (taking risks), centred on research and innovation activities across the entire innovation chain, including the feedback effects between basic and applied research.
Encourage cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral, and cross-actor innovation: Missions should be framed in such a way as to spark activity across, and among, multiple scientific disciplines (including social sciences and humanities), across different industrial sectors (e.g. transport, nutrition, health, services), and different types of actors (public, private, third sector, civil society organisations).
Involve multiple, bottom-up solutions: Missions should not be achievable by a single development path, or by a single technology. They must be open to being addressed by different types of solutions.
Source (Mazzucato and Dibb, 2019[21]).
Enabling the mission-approach to tackle climate mitigation sub-targets
Whole-of-society climate mitigation targets are arguably too all-encompassing to fully leverage the mission approach. The breadth of the problem space makes it challenging to effectively harness ecosystem and network by bringing together and galvanize relevant actors. It also makes it challenging to secure iterative experimentation, learning and diffusion loops, without providing more specificity and directionality. Ideally, such a broad challenge would therefore benefit from being chunked up into narrower and more specific problems to fully harness the mission approach.
Visualisation of the interdependencies between the Paris Agreement, the climate targets of the Nationally Determined Contributions, and underpinning sectoral emission reduction targets
Source: Authors’ elaboration
Appropriately, national climate targets are often broken down into sub-targets (e.g. through carbon budgets), which typically fall along sectoral or semi-sectoral lines. NDCs typically rely on needed shifts in different areas or sectors of the economy. Common sectors for which such sub-targets include Energy, Transportation, Industry, Agriculture, Forestry and land use, Buildings and construction, and Waste management. Figure 2.3 visualises the resulting interdependencies between the Paris Agreement, Nationally Determined Contributions, and underlying sectoral targets. Further, Figure 2.4 illustrates the extent to which sectoral targets are common also amongst OECD countries’ centre of government efforts to mainstream climate resilience objectives at the sectoral level. These sectoral targets present an ideal frame in which to harness the mission-oriented approach, if the broader governance context allows for it.
Note: n=27; Respondents to the 2023 survey were asked “What formal mechanisms, tools and instruments are deployed by your government to mainstream climate resilience objectives at the sectoral level? (as outlined in domestic or international commitments)”.
Source: (Kaur et al., 2023[11]). Data from (OECD, 2024[22]), Survey on Strategic Decision-making at the Centre of Government.
While these sub-targets are generally linked to certain sectors and are referred to (in this report and in the wider literature) as sectoral targets, their realisation systematically rely on cross-sectoral or cross-societal efforts. Due to interdependencies, it is impossible to address emissions in transportation, for instance, without considering energy production, urban planning, and technological innovation. Similarly, curtailing emissions from the energy sector requires coordinated action across industry, buildings, and consumer behaviour change.
Addressing sub-objectives of the climate targets allows for running multiple parallel missions, in effect allowing to ’divide and conquer’ to take on the myriad of interlinked challenges that make up GHG emissions reduction. Missions do not necessarily have to be centralised, but can be run at different levels of government, such as the regional or city level, or be initiated and led by ecosystems of actors within industry, civil society, or research and academia. This multi-pronged approach to climate targets, enabled by effective mission governance, aligns well with what Ostrom’s encouragement for a polycentric approach to climate change. This view challenges the assumption that only large-scale, top-down policies can solve global collective action problems, and instead champions multi-level, diverse set of policies working in parallel (Ostrom, 2010[23]). Such an approach, she argues, allows to better leverage local or specialised knowledge, ensure experimentation and learning, and build trust and reciprocity. Arguably, the Paris Agreement is itself based on a polycentric approach to governance, by welcoming experimentation amongst national governments, as well as by encouraging actions by non-state and subnational actors alike (Jordan et al., 2018[24]).
Additionally, mission governance has many parallels to what Sabel and Victor (2022[25]) describe as 'experimentalist governance’ – a process of solution-finding which helps tackle uncertainty by enabling actors to iteratively test and scale up solutions – and exemplified by the 1987 Montreal Protocol on reducing ozone-depleting pollution, in which top-down were combined with steering from industry and regulatory experts. Through experimentalist governance, “firms, public authorities and civil society institutionalize the co-ordination and learning of that complexity makes necessary without attempting the kind of planning that uncertainty makes impossible” (Sabel and Victor, 2022[25]). For Hale (2024[1]), “experimentalist governance works best for issue domains where there is a degree of boundedness, such as the technological transitions in certain industrial sectors”. Such sectoral transition challenges are typically marked by a limited number of market-shaping firms and governmental actors, who can be mobilised in different frameworks. Hale note further that “happily, these scope conditions include large swaths of the mitigation challenge, like transitioning heavy industry and transport to clean technologies” (Hale, 2024, p. 60[1]). Indeed, numerous mission-oriented initiatives exist across various such sectors, fostering collaboration to drive innovation towards specific climate-related targets. These efforts initiatives are present in areas such as electric vehicles, green hydrogen production, zero-emissions steel manufacturing, and sustainable aviation (Victor, Geels and Sharpe, 2019[26])
For such sector-targeted climate missions, there is the potential to focus on a country’s specific difficulties in terms of meeting their climate targets, but also to harness strengths and opportunities (co-benefits) for its economies or development. Examples of this strategic approach includes Denmark’s InnoMissions described in Box 2.3, but also Norway’s mission, as a leading ocean-based food production nation, to transition to climate neutral fish feed.
As will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, the mission-oriented approach has been adopted in a myriad of recent climate-related efforts within actor-led coalitions within the STI sphere, as well as numerous European cities. However, these MOIPs are largely disconnected from the wider national GHG emission reduction efforts and missing the governance that would enable a truly mission-oriented approach. In particular, they are too narrowly focused on technological innovation and STI policy (the ‘STI trap’), they fall short of influencing policy beside providing directionality (the ‘orientation trap’) and they are not able to leverage resources beside public budget (the ‘policy trap’) (OECD, 2024[27]).
Exemplifying the strategic use of sectoral MOIPs to address key challenges in achieving national climate targets, as well as build on national strengths
In September 2020, the Danish government unveiled a comprehensive national strategy for green research and development: "Future Green Solutions - Strategy for Investments in Green Research, Technology and Innovation." The strategy identified four key green missions targeting sectors with the greatest need for innovation and potential for climate impact, both in Denmark and globally. These four missions planted the seed for four “Green Research and Innovation Partnerships”;
INNO-CCUS: CO2 capture, storage, and utilization of CO2
MissionGreenFuels: Green fuels for transport and industry (incl. Power-to-X)
AgriFoodTure: Climate-friendly agriculture and food production
Partnership for Circular Economy in Plastics and Textiles: Circular economy with focus on plastic waster and textiles
These ecosystem-driven missions, launched in 2022, were designed specifically to both leverage existing research and business strengths, and address key challenges in Denmark’s green transition. As such, they are directly linked to Denmark's ambitions to achieve 70% emissions reduction by 2035, reach net zero by 2050, as well as contribute to the SDGs.
The mission partnerships – made up of businesses, universities, research institutions, and civil society organisations – started by developing roadmaps for each respective mission, outlining proposed research and innovation efforts through 2030 and 2050. These roadmaps were collaborative efforts, involving substantial expert consultations; the AgriFoodTure roadmap, for instance, received contributions from over 300 researchers.
Based on the roadmaps, from 2021 to 2023, Denmark’s Innovation Fund and its partners have allocated approximately 1.3 billion DKK to support strategic research, capacity building, talent development and concrete project activities along the value chains across the four missions.
The partnerships have launched numerous projects and initiatives, circa 10-20 per mission, to develop short- and long-term solutions on both supply (e.g. technology upscaling) and demand side (e.g. business model generation). In 2023, the partnerships selected additional projects to accelerate progress towards their roadmap goal, further expanding partnership membership and network engagement.
In October 2024, the government vowed to strengthen and scale up the four green research missions further, allocating 15 billion kroner for green research and innovation in the period 2025-2030 and proposing a further focus on removing barriers to technology deployment and cross-mission co-ordination (Denmark's Ministry of Higher Education and Science, 2024[28]).
A layered approach to harnessing missions to meet climate targets
The full picture of this conceptualisation of climate targets as broad missions is illustrated in the three levels pictured in Figure 2.5:
National climate targets, such as the NDCs, effectively function as broad overarching mission statements. Mission governance can therefore help governments operationalise and successfully deliver on these ambitious objectives.
Mission governance also enables the effective integration of narrower missions to address specific sub-targets on which the climate targets rely, allowing to fully leverage key features of the mission-oriented approach within specific sectors.
Finally, realising these more targeted missions should in turn guide the deployment of different mission-oriented policies though portfolios of projects and initiatives, leveraging different instruments across policy domains. A systems approach can help policy makers identify and prioritise the policy packages with the most potential to trigger systemic transformations (Box 2.4). Note that the term mission-oriented policies here refer to policies “oriented” towards accomplishing a specific pre-defined mission, as opposed to towards supporting a mission-driven approach more generally, as is the case for many current mission-oriented innovation policies.2
Source: OECD.
The next chapter explores these three levels in more depth, in particular experiences from mission-oriented innovation policies for net zero, as well as the principles of mission governance.
A systems approach can help policy makers identify and prioritise the policies with the most potential to trigger systemic transformations (see box note). When taking a systems approach, the policy maker focuses on understanding the interconnectedness of elements within a system and seeks to transform the system’s functioning to influence future behaviour patterns. They aim to identify where the potential for change – or leverage points, in systems jargon – lies within the system, and which policies can trigger such change and lead to better-functioning systems.
The OECD has developed a 3-step process – Systems Innovation for Net Zero, Figure 2.6 – to facilitate the use of a systems approach in policy decision-making. Such a process can both guide the definition of missions and help Governments identify the actions with the most potential to trigger change to achieve already-defined missions.
Source: (OECD, 2022[31]).
In the first step of the process – envision – policy makers are invited to reflect on the ideas and goals guiding policy decisions, and what is possible when these ideas change. In the second step – understand – policy makers are invited to visualize and reflect on the system’s structure leading to current patterns of behaviours and results, and to identify the policies with the most potential to “push” on high-leverage points and trigger systems change. Several systemic tools can help visualise the system’s structure and identify the policies with high transformative potential (transformative policies hereafter). These tools include causal loop diagrams, stock and flow analysis, and mental model analyses. In the third step – redesign – policy makers are invited to identify and agree on the policies to prioritise based on their transformative potential, and to design/lead processes as to enable the conditions for the implementation of such policies at scale. While the understand step focuses on individual policies, no single policy can transform a complex system. This step focuses on designing well-balanced policy packages that include a combination of policies, ensuring that the policies combined enhance the transformative potential of single policy instruments.
Note: A systems approach is based on insights from complexity science, which studies the characteristic and behaviour of complex systems. Complexity science suggests that the system’s structure – i.e. the way parts are organised - greatly influences the results and patterns of behaviour observed over time (Monat and Gannon, 2015[32]; Zimmerman, Lindberg and Plsek, 2009[33]) (Meadows, 2008[34]) (Sterman, 2000[35]; Systems Innovation, 2020[36]). It also suggests that there is more “potential for change” (Meadows, 2008[34]) in the way the system elements are organised (i.e. on the system’s structure), than on the properties of the elements taken separately (Zimmerman, Lindberg and Plsek, 2009[33]), and that change can be faster than expected - in the desired direction or not - due to non-linearities or feedback loops in complex systems.
Source: OECD.
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← 1. At the time of writing, membership in the ICCN included councils from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Denmark, European Union, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Iceland, Ireland, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Philippines, South Africa, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
← 2. See the idea of the “STI reversal” in (Jonason, 2023[37]) describing “cases (such as for the Horizon Europe missions or the Netherlands’ Top Sectors policy) where the policies precede and set the groundwork for defining specific mission initiatives [...]. Thus, instead of having a mission inform and shape policies, here the policies are initiating the mission. In practice, these mission-oriented innovation policies often take the shape of programmes, typically administered by government agencies, which call for and then fund different types of mission platforms.”