Crafting missions in practice: a formative assessment of public management in European net-zero policy
Iacopo Gronchi
What the paper says
Despite nearly a decade of engagement with mission-oriented policy, European governments struggle to translate its promises into real outcomes. This paper aims to address this implementation gap by proposing a formative assessment framework centered on missioncraft: the institutional work that public managers perform to support their implementation. Drawing on 54 interviews and official documentation covering 34 net-zero missions led by 12 European governments, the paper identifies three pathways through which public managers pursue mission progress: interventionist, facilitative, and hybrid. The analysis shows that mission-oriented policy implementation is best understood as an experimentalist process shaped by continuous administrative engagement with institutional barriers, rather than as the linear execution of a fixed political design. By linking formative assessment to the everyday practice of public management, the proposed framework provides a diagnostic tool to detect implementation gaps, support strategic learning, and inform adaptive managerial responses.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.