Governments play a pivotal role in ensuring that global climate change mitigation targets are reached, most notably through the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). To reach these ambitious goals, governments need to apply innovative policy measures and strategies. The use of innovative governance approaches, including mission-oriented innovation, to inform climate and environmental decision making and policies is recognised in the OECD Action Plan on Governing Green, endorsed by Member countries at the OECD Public Governance Ministerial Meeting in Luxembourg in November 2022.
The purpose of the report is to explore the contribution of missions, both as vehicles for new forms of governance and as policy delivery mechanisms, to achieve the ambitious national climate mitigation commitments stemming from the 2015 Paris Agreements. So far, mission approaches have rarely been explicitly used to achieve these overarching objectives. Instead, mission-oriented approaches have been constrained to narrower domains, primarily science and technology policy, where their transformative potential is limited. Given that most countries are finding it difficult to stay on track to meet their climate targets, more novel and adapted governance strategies are needed to meet this existential challenge and provide the conditions necessary for success.
By taking a top-down and national-target-focused view of climate mitigation, this report complements the 2024 OECD report Mission-Oriented Innovation Policy for Net Zero, which assesses the effectiveness of 101 net zero missions. It builds on the research of the OECD Mission Action Lab, a joint initiative of the OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation (STI), the OECD Directorate for Public Governance (GOV), and the OECD Development Co-Operation Directorate (DCD).
The report is an output of the work of the OECD Directorate for Public Governance on Governing Green, part of the OECD Reinforcing Democracy Initiative. It was approved by the OECD Public Governance Committee on 17 January 2025 and prepared for publication by the Secretariat.