Governing missions in cities — highlights from emergent practice
Cities are on the frontlines of society’s biggest challenges. The climate crisis, economic inequality, historical racial injustice, inequitable access to basic social services, severe mistrust of public institutions — these overlapping challenges have been described as a ‘polycrisis’, and cities are squarely on the frontline of dealing with them. However, cities may also be the emergent leverage points where potential solutions can be found.
Local governments have begun using mission-oriented innovation to think big about how cities could serve as a locus for transformation in the face of societal challenges. Can a city become carbon neutral in a decade? Can cities ensure all residents live in neighbourhoods with access to healthy, affordable food? Can a city make affordable, efficient, and comfortable housing a basic right of all residents?
No city could achieve a mission as ambitious as those above just by taking action through the local government. To fundamentally shift the political economy of a city to meaningfully address the scope and complexity of the challenges we face today, demands governing processes of change in new ways.
To explore the reality (and the difficulties) of how cities have begun governing their bold agendas to directly take on the biggest, most complex challenges they face, IIPP’s Mission Oriented Innovation Network (MOIN) recently brought together a group of practitioners from Barcelona’s metropolitan governance body (PEMB), Spain; Camden Council, UK; the Greater London Authority (GLA), UK; the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), UK; Reykjavik, Iceland; and Valencia, Spain to examine their experiences and share lessons as peers.
Below are a few themes that emerged from the group’s discussion. We are sharing insights from this discussion with the hope that other cities on the path of leading their own mission-oriented innovation journeys can learn from the experience of these pioneering cities. We invite you, particularly practitioners thinking about missions in place-based contexts, to share your reflections, critiques, and feedback.
Collaboration across diverse types of organisations
The practitioners highlighted several examples of how their missions have been able to bring together a range of organisations to take synergistic action toward advancing a common goal. For instance, the GLA’s open-innovation challenge-led Designing London’s Recovery programme was one mechanism that was developed to bring together a range of innovators to engage in experimentation activities that helped advance four of the city’s missions. Meanwhile, Valencia’s designed a quintuple helix framework that’s being used to bring together a dynamic ecosystem of organisations across the public sector, private sector, civil society, media, and academia to begin collaborating. Missions seem to be providing the cities with a governance scaffolding being used to thread together cross-sectoral activities between growing networks of diverse organisations.
Several practitioners also described the challenges they have begun contending with. There were several reasons outlined for why expanding collaboration was difficult to sustain — difficulties forging meaningful relationships with potential partners, challenges finding organisations with the capacity to take action, overcoming the complexity of diffusing ownership over a mission from one organisation onto a collection of partners, challenges determining how genuine collective action can be sustainably resourced over time. While governing collaboration across a large span of stakeholders is no easy feat, on balance, this appears to be one area where missions seem to offer cities opportunities to mobilise and coordinate broad action between cross-sectoral organisations.
Storytelling and building a collective narrative
How do you get a seemingly disconnected group of actors to share a vision and grow a network of collaborators? This was a key challenge the practitioners discussed to expand the reach of their missions. Several practitioners discussed their missions being used to direct activity from a broad group of stakeholders toward a shared goal — such as GMCA’s challenge group model or Valencia’s mission ambassador framework. These examples from the practitioners illustrate positive examples of organising existing relationships within the cities between the local government with other partners and directing those relationships toward a concrete goal. However, several practitioners discussed the challenge they faced expanding the scope of their missions to reach new organisations they did not already have existing relationships with.
The practitioners identified storytelling and articulating an emergent narrative for their missions as a critical opportunity to overcome this challenge. Building an inspiring narrative, told through different storytelling mediums, was a capability the practitioners explored that could help expand the reach of their city’s missions. For example, Camden recently launched their State of the Borough report and designed it with the intention that it would, in part, help the Council convey a compelling story about where the borough currently is in the long-term pathway of its missions with the hope to encourage new organisations to engage in the projects that are currently being taken forward.
Creating space for learning
A key aspect of governing a long-term process is harnessing continual activity across multiple stakeholders that are narrowly directed toward a specific goal or outcome. In these contexts, there is also often the pressure of having accountability to a set of stakeholders and needing to demonstrate progress over time. However, missions require openness to experimentation and risk-taking, as innovation is inherently needed to find long-term success. Local governments and other partners contending with this tension can find themselves negotiating between competing forces and buckle towards the comfortable impulse to operationalise activities through delivery plans. The practitioners described this pressure, recognising that progress must be shown to satisfy stakeholders they are accountable to and to provide some form of confirmation that ‘the right’ actions are being taken but also recognising the necessity of maintaining openness, agility, and space for learning if innovations are going to be produced.
There was extensive discussion about how this space for learning could be cultivated through governing a city’s mission. Some practitioners provided examples of deliberately building new capabilities and approaches that could be used to proactively take risks and innovate in new ways. GLA, for instance, worked with partners that could support design-led innovation and evaluation and learning to be used as an approach for testing new ideas and cultivating learning through experimentation. For others, this meant considering how a mission’s progress was being monitored and evaluated. Several practitioners discussed wanting to create new mission-aligned impact evaluation frameworks that would incentivise their ability to pursue innovation through taking calculated risks rather than monitoring and assessing their activities through conventional evaluation frameworks such as key performance indicators (KPIs) that can restrict action.
Using the soft powers and roles of local government to steer change
Local governments have ‘hard’ powers which help them deliver their mandatory services and core responsibilities. Depending on their country’s specific legal and legislative systems, local governments have different regulatory authorities (e.g., zoning law), financial powers (e.g., property tax), and policymaking authorities (e.g., vehicle emissions zoning) that can all exist in their ‘hard’ powers toolbelt. Local governments also have ‘soft’ powers they can use to advance their interests, but these are often downplayed or even can go overlooked. There are a range of soft powers that local governments can leverage, from having a large microphone that can attract attention to being able to be a magnet that can bring diverse stakeholders together to being large employers in a local market.
The type of governance needed to steer a mission can be highly defuse, politicised and amorphous, making it a challenging space for local governments to insert themselves within. Through the discussion, the practitioners described how they have come to begin seeing the soft powers their organisation’s yield as a powerful rudder that can be used to steer the dynamic and delicate process of governing a mission. GMCA has been using a range of powers to govern its mission, including several soft powers. As the practitioners continued exploring how they have creatively used their local governments’ soft powers to advance their missions, a question began to emerge — if successful in diffusing a ‘good mission’ across a diverse range of stakeholders, how can local governments effectively lead what would become a leaderless agenda? While there was no resolution, it is a query the practitioners have begun exploring as they seek to govern what they hope becomes an agenda that is owned by every stakeholder across their city.
As ‘mission practice’ continues to advance, mission practitioners everywhere benefit by bringing pioneering peers together to share their experiences and learnings with the broader community. We plan to continue creating spaces for public sector innovators experimenting with missions to share their journeys with one another. And we will continue to share those conversations back out to you so the community of practitioners, researchers, advocates, and decision-makers can continue to produce new learning and knowledge together.
You can learn more about the Mission Oriented Innovation Network if you are interested in how we support the growing global community of public sector organisations experimenting with mission-oriented innovation.
From 6–7 June we host our MOIN Gathering, centred on the theme ‘Mission-oriented innovation: The state of play.’ The MOIN Gathering will be a unique opportunity for public sector organisations to meet and exchange ideas with each other, IIPP faculty, students and wider networks. Find out more and join us online.
You can also learn more about our work with local governments through our Cities Programme.
