Harnessing Mission Governance to Achieve National Climate Targets

5. Proposing a multi-level mission-oriented approach to operationalise national climate targets

Abstract

This concluding chapter presents a summary of the findings of the report, along with key recommendations. The analysis describes how a mission-oriented lens can help ensure that the governance to meet national climate targets is commensurate to the challenge at hand. The report proposes enlisting the mission governance principles at an overarching level, as well as targeted and strategically tailored mission efforts at sub-target level, building on the experiences of more bottom-up and often siloed mission-oriented innovation policies for net zero. The focus then shifts to broader lessons for transitions policy at large, linked the OECD agenda on governing green, as well as potential next steps.

Summary of findings

Given the crucial role of national climate targets in the global efforts to combat climate change, and the failures to deliver on these commitments, countries need to rethink the way they govern these society-wide efforts. The policy-instrument of missions, which relies on an innovative form of governance centred on delivering on ambitious, measurable, and time-bound policy objectives, appears well-adapted to the task. Yet, missions are today mostly leveraged at lower policy making levels, mainly within Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) policy, where they are mostly disconnected from the wider climate efforts and lack the necessary reach, legitimacy or influence for the needed transformational impact. To remedy this situation and bridge the gap between missions and national climate targets, this report proposes a multi-level mission-oriented approach to operationalise national climate targets.

Countries can leverage mission governance to secure necessary enabling conditions to reach ambitious climate targets

In order to implement their climate targets and stay true to their NDC commitments, countries need to take into account the scale and complexity of the challenge at hand and work proactively to secure adequate and holistic governance. Such ambitious policy objectives are far from self-fulfilling – without fit-for-purpose governance, countries are poorly positioned to walk the talk of climate change mitigation.

Therefore, countries need to audit the governance and policy framework put in place to assess if it is up to the task and to act on potential gaps. The mission governance principles, which articulates the mechanisms through which ambitious cross-sectoral objectives to which the pathway is uncertain can be met, can serve as a design and assessment tool for this purpose. Depending on the mission specifics and the national context, different principles will be more important than others.

As exhibited in the analysis, independent climate councils can play a key role to provide this guidance for Governments, providing a critical and long view on country-specific challenges and opportunities beyond political cycles. Some climate councils (e.g. Sweden, France, Denmark) are already applying a governance lens to some degree – others can learn from their examples or request their mandates to be expanded to allow for assessing governance enablers along with their traditional focus of quantitative assessment of emissions reductions.

Some climate councils have developed frameworks or grids for the purpose of assessing their countries’ enabling environment for meeting their climate targets. These already tend to align well with the mission approach and can benefit from further leveraging the mission governance principles to help ensure a holistic view of governance needs for successful mission realisation.

Some mission governance principles appear particularly underutilised in climate policy

On an aggregate basis across the 15 countries included in the analysis, the following elements of the mission-oriented approach appear to be underutilised in national climate mitigation efforts:

• Innovation and experimentation. Policy innovation will be necessary to address the complex and unprecedented challenges of climate change, and there currently seems to be a disconnect between climate efforts and the R&D efforts to support climate mitigation. The lack of emphasis on innovation and experimentation in climate council reports suggests this area is underleveraged.

• Mobilisation. While stakeholder consultation is common, there is limited active involvement of diverse actors in the delivery of climate action. The potential for mobilising communities, the private sector, and not-for-profits to share ownership of the mission remains underleveraged.

Notably, these are elements that mission-oriented innovation policies (MOIPs) for net zero are especially geared towards. Unfortunately, these often appear disconnected from the wider climate policy efforts.

Other principles of mission governance align well with identified gaps or established features of climate mitigation efforts

The assessments identify many gaps in governments’ climate action, areas where stronger support is deemed to be necessary to reach the laid-out targets. Adopting a mission governance lens could channel and guide efforts into these areas. By establishing clearer mandates, agencies and organisations could participate more fully in climate action. An emphasis on cultivating enduring political support could lead to more consistent policies resistant to short-term fluctuations. Improved horizontal and vertical co-ordination could align plans and resources more effectively across government levels and agencies. A mission-oriented approach could also help integrate climate considerations into core government processes like budgeting and procurement. By focusing on developing necessary capabilities throughout the mission lifecycle, critical capacity gaps in climate action could be addressed. The promotion of reflexivity and continuous adaptation could enhance the agility and effectiveness of climate strategies. Furthermore, the mission approach's emphasis on guiding private sector investment could help multiply the effect of public funding in climate action.

By viewing climate action through a mission governance lens, policy makers can approach these areas more systematically, treating climate mitigation not as disparate policies, but as a cohesive, goal-oriented mission requiring coordinated effort across government and society. This perspective could lead to more formal cross-departmental teams, long-term funding mechanisms, adaptive management systems, and broader societal engagement, ultimately resulting in more coherent, adaptable, and effective climate strategies.

Finally, on the very end of the spectrum – again at the aggregate level – some principles of mission governance appear relatively well-established in the climate policy sphere, at least in countries which have chosen to institute some form of independent climate council. These include Framework, Anchoring, Roadmaps, Broad Policy Mix, and Public Funding. The specific governance strategies and dynamics at play can serve as examples and inspiration for policy makers and mission practitioners in other fields, demonstrating how to approach whole-of-government and whole-of-society efforts that go well beyond a particular policy level, area, or instrument.

Enabling the adoption of effective missions to tackle concrete climate sub-targets

To fully leverage the mission approach, especially in term of ecosystem mobilisation, experimentation, and societal engagement, a narrower problem space helps. Governments should therefore consider the multi-level nature of climate mitigation targets, in which the overarching national targets are typically further divided and based on sub-targets such as sectoral emission reduction targets or budgets.

These narrower frames present an opportunity to tailor mission efforts to the specificity of the particular sub-target it seeks to address, in terms of market, challenge, institutional and stakeholder dynamics. These narrower frames allow for tailoring missions structures (cross-sector committees or boards, secretariats, or operational/executive teams). Multiple such climate missions can contribute to a policy-centric strategy, in which diverse set of entities and policies work in parallel, allowing for effective use of local or domain-specific knowledge, enabling experimentation and learning, and building trust and reciprocity​ (Ostrom, 2010[1])​.

Current mission-oriented policies for net zero go a long way in this direction, but often suffer from being siloed to specific policy levels, areas, budgets, and/or instruments – severely limiting their potential to leverage the mission approach and go beyond policy-as-usual. They tend to be too narrowly focused on technological innovation and rely almost exclusively on STI policy interventions (the ‘STI trap’), fall short on the implementation of their own strategic agendas (the ‘orientation trap’), and have difficulties leveraging resources beyond the public sector sphere (the ‘policy trap’) (OECD, 2024[2]). Importantly, to go beyond these traps and for missions to be effective, they require an enabling context characterised by mission governance.

Furthermore, many current mission-oriented policies for net zero tend to be disconnected to the overarching society-wide mitigation targets and efforts. Notably, only a handful of the climate assessments analysed for this report make even fleeting references or acknowledgments of their countries’ mission-oriented innovation policies for net zero or their contributions to or role regarding meeting national climate targets. This undercuts these important efforts, and further contributes to their being siloed and failing to influence policy beyond their policy domains. Existing mission-oriented policies for net zero need to be clearly integrated into national climate target efforts and given responsibility to meet certain sub-targets or solve specific roadblocks in meeting these targets, in order to attract resources and legitimacy across policy domains. This would also provide increased pressure, but also potential for prestige, on participating stakeholders. A context in which the tenets of mission governance are adopted at the level of the national climate targets efforts would be particularly propitious for such ‘levelled up’ mission-oriented policies.

Such missions should ideally build on the specific challenges and/or strengths of countries’ climate mitigation efforts

With missions to address climate mitigation sub-targets, there is a potential to focus on country’s specific weaknesses and opportunities. Governments can identify key areas of risk in the country’s mitigation pathways as well as opportunities (co-benefits), for instance in terms of industrial strengths, or potential economic or welfare gains. If these are specific, complex and beyond traditional policy capabilities, policy makers can create subsequent mission-oriented policies to address the risks or sub-targets. In particular, the strategic deployment of mission-oriented innovation policies can play an important part of the broader efforts to meet climate targets via tackling specific technical or innovation challenges, such as carbon dioxide removal, sustainable food systems, or clean hydrogen.

Denmark’s InnoMissions are a good example of this approach (see Box 2.3), as are Norway’s mission of adopting climate neutral fish feed, and Nesta’s mission on scaling deployment of heat pump technology. The UK’s mission control model for its Clean Energy Mission is another development, which seeks to put the ideas of mission-oriented government into practice (see Box 4.2).

Broader lessons for transitions policy at large

The multi-level mission-oriented approach, leveraging missions as both a governance framework and targeted policy instruments, offers a promising pathway to address the broader need for social and political innovation. This approach can complement and enhance other emerging governance models, such as anticipatory governance, to meet the complex, interconnected challenges that define the 21st century. Climate change in particular presents not just a challenge but an opportunity to refine and improve our governance systems over time. As Hale (2024, pp. 178-180[3]) aptly notes, “Climate change gives us a good reason to govern better over time.” He continues, “The challenge of climate, and of long problems more generally, is not to wait for human governance to be shaped by our new realities but to get at least somewhat ahead of them."

Next steps

This analysis rests on the assessments made by national climate councils, which leaves countries with different institutional arrangements outside of its scope. These countries tend to represent relatively mature climate policy systems, whose insights and experiences could help accelerate progress in countries with less developed climate governance. Yet, further analysis, which will require other types of research inputs, will be needed to broaden lessons and implications across a broader range of countries.

Further work on how governments can best take on the momentous task of securing a green transition is being developed through the OECD Public Governance Directorate agenda on Governing Green (OECD, forthcoming[4]), as well as the OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation agenda on Transformative STI Policies (OECD, 2024[5]), as well as extensive efforts to advance climate policy at the OECD Environmental Directorate and across the OECD though the Net Zero Plus Project (OECD, 2024[6]).

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