Missions for sustainability: New approaches for science and society

Themes

• Sustainability

  The mission approach claims to put innovation activity and growth to the service of the SDGs and a transformation towards sustainability. However, established R&I institutions and approaches often still pursue economic growth and technical optimization as principal goals. How can sustainable mission objectives be achieved within the existing R&I settings? What contradictions and challenges arise, and how can they be overcome?

• Trade-offs

  Formulating missions and prioritizing societal goals implies to confront goal conflicts that are partly hard or even impossible to resolve. How can the mission approach account for the need to find acceptable trade-offs without compromising its own conception? What procedural designs would allow to identify, assess and cope with trade-offs both ex-ante as well as during mission implementation?

• Scientific freedom

  Missions imply to steer scientific activity based on ethical choices (sustainability) and political legitimacy (participation), both of which necessarily con-strains the freedom of science to define its own questions and priorities. To what extent can societal relevance form a condition for (publicly financed) research, and how can this be assessed? What balance and relations should be established between research aligned through missions and other research?

• Governance

  Missions demand a new extent and quality of coordination across multiple institutional boundaries e.g. between policy domains (including esp. R&I), administrative levels, territories and sectors (public, private, civil), resulting in novel intermediary designs. In addition they also require inclusive stakeholder participation at different stages. What governance approaches are needed to deal with the related challenges (e.g. leadership, authority, legitimacy) while ensuring meaningful involvement and effective implementation?

  Subsidiarity: The mission approach builds on diversity in a large and heterogeneous research landscape to achieve its goals. What role should be played by local or re-gional R&I approaches, since they are comparatively limited in terms of diversity while in turn featuring dense governance and collaboration structures (institutional thickness) as well as qualities of place? What are the respective potentials and limits at the local to European level, and how can missions at different levels become cou-pled effectively?

  Responsibility: Missions involve science and scientists directly in the conception and design of transformative policies, measures and technologies, as well as their exper-imental implementation and evaluation. How can these new formats of science-policy coordination resolve questions of responsibility, accountability and legitimacy regarding the role of science? What framework conditions (e.g. error culture) and procedures would be required particularly with a view to the complexity of problems and uncertainty of solutions?

• Social learning

  Missions require continuous reflexivity in order to quickly assess results and trigger research adjustments, policy learning as well as broader social learning processes. What approaches, methods and criteria are needed for monitoring and as-sessing missions and their progress? How could missions become embedded within exist-ing structures and processes of policy- and social learning?

• Complexity

  Missions can differ significantly depending on the nature, scope, scale, and urgency of the challenges they focus on. How should the approach account for these different degrees of complexity? What adaptations are required esp. in terms of govern-ance and timing?