Whoever wins the next election will be governing within a highly constrained and challenging environment. Public finances, political capital, public trust, and the capacity of our public service to design and deliver policy are all scarce. 

Our public services often feel like they are caught in a tailspin caused by a seemingly endless series of complex and systemic crises.

It is clear that the way government works needs to change – and working in a mission-driven way could be the answer.

The question is what does that mean in practice?

Our new initiative, Mission Public, will grapple with some of these questions.

Through the UK 2040 Options project we’ve been looking at the ‘what’ of government policy: what policies would improve outcomes for people by 2040? In The Radical How report, we drew lessons from pioneering teams already working in Whitehall, as well as from Nesta’s own experience of becoming a mission-driven organisation.

We now want to build on this work by looking more closely at the ‘how’.

• In partnership with the Institute for Government, we’ll unpick what governing by missions really means – and how to make the most of it.
• We’ll be doing a deep-dive into making missions stick; conducting research around the benefits of a long-term approach for policy and policymakers, and what policy instruments could support this.
• We’ll be exploring an action-learning network to support the adoption of mission-driven government, bringing together policy practitioners to learn the best approaches to policy delivery.