Mission-oriented innovation policy — the idea that governments should direct innovation toward solving grand societal challenges rather than simply subsidizing R&D — is being tested at extraordinary scale through the European Green Deal. But as Wiarda et al. (2025) show in Science and Public Policy, the justice dimension of these missions has been systematically underaddressed. Most MOIP frameworks emphasize technological transformation while neglecting who bears the costs and who captures the benefits.
The Justice Gap
Wiarda and colleagues conduct a systematic review of how mission-oriented innovation policies have addressed justice considerations. Their findings reveal a persistent blind spot: missions are designed to solve collective problems (climate change, pandemics, digital transition) but rarely incorporate mechanisms to ensure equitable distribution of the burdens and benefits of transformation. The Green Deal, for instance, aims to make Europe climate-neutral by 2050 — but the transition costs fall disproportionately on fossil-fuel-dependent regions, low-income households, and workers in carbon-intensive industries.
Geography and Governance
Uyarra et al. (2025), in Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, examine the geographic dimensions of MOIP. Missions are typically designed at the national or supranational level, but innovation happens in places — in specific regions with specific industrial structures, institutional capacities, and labor markets. The mismatch between the scale at which missions are defined and the scale at which they must be implemented creates governance challenges that purely technocratic approaches cannot resolve.
Defense Meets Decarbonization
Cantafio Apitz et al. (2026), in Politics and Governance, examine a particularly revealing case: the intersection of defense and decarbonization in mission-oriented policy. Military establishments are among the largest institutional carbon emitters, yet they are largely exempt from civilian climate regulations. The tension between national security imperatives and environmental missions illustrates the limits of MOIP when powerful institutional interests resist transformation. The authors argue that genuinely transformative mission-oriented policy must engage with these power structures rather than working around them — a politically demanding requirement that most MOIP frameworks avoid.
The collective lesson is sobering: designing a mission is the easy part. Implementing it in ways that are geographically sensitive, distributionally just, and politically viable is where the real innovation challenge lies — and it is a challenge that technology alone cannot solve.
The Implementation Gap
The distance from policy design to on-the-ground implementation is where most mission-oriented innovation policies encounter their greatest challenges. Missions are designed in capital cities by policymakers with system-level perspectives. They are implemented in specific places by specific organizations with specific constraints. The coal region that must transition to renewable energy, the farming community that must adopt precision agriculture, the manufacturing cluster that must decarbonize: each faces the mission through the lens of its own economic structure and institutional capacity.
Uyarra et al.'s geographic analysis reveals that MOIP implementation varies dramatically across regions, even within the same country. Regions with strong innovation ecosystems adapt missions to their capabilities. Regions with weak ecosystems experience missions as externally imposed mandates that they lack the resources to fulfill. The same mission that catalyzes transformation in one region may deepen frustration in another.
The justice dimension is not merely a normative concern but a practical one. Missions that impose unequal costs without compensating mechanisms generate political opposition that can derail the entire program. The Yellow Vest protests in France demonstrated that even well-intentioned environmental missions can fail when distributional impacts are ignored. The emerging consensus is that MOIP needs a justice architecture, with mechanisms for assessing distributional impacts and ensuring that affected communities have voice in how transformation is designed and implemented.
The Evaluation Problem
Mission-oriented innovation policy also faces an evaluation problem that traditional innovation policy does not. Standard innovation programs can be evaluated against clear metrics: patents produced, startups created, technologies commercialized. Missions are evaluated against societal outcomes, such as carbon reduction, pandemic preparedness, or digital inclusion, that are influenced by many factors beyond the innovation program itself. Attributing societal outcomes to specific policy interventions is methodologically challenging, and the long time horizons of transformative missions mean that evaluation results arrive decades after policy decisions are made.
This evaluation gap creates accountability problems. Policymakers who launch ambitious missions may be out of office before outcomes can be assessed. Successor governments may abandon or redirect missions before they have time to produce results. The temporal mismatch between political cycles and transformation timescales is a structural challenge that no amount of policy design can fully resolve. It can only be managed through institutional mechanisms, such as independent evaluation bodies, cross-party commitments, and international peer review, that provide continuity beyond individual political administrations.