Governance of Policy Failure Risks in the Design and Implementation of Mission-Oriented Innovation Policies – Sustainability experiences from the Global North (GRIP)

Lead-PI: Mercedes Bleda, University of Manchester

Consortium: Seweryn Krupnik, Jagiellonian University; Alexandra Mallett, Carleton University.

Funders: NCN, SSHRC, UKRI

 

Summary:

Mission oriented innovation policies (MOIP) are a new generation of transformative policies aimed at fostering innovations that help address complex societal challenges. The uncertain, multilevel, and complex character of MOIP exacerbates the risk of policy failure, i.e., the risk of the policies not delivering their intended goals, leading to ineffective policy support and growing distrust towards governments. This project aims to analyse policy failure risks in the design and implementation of MOIP and identify suitable risk governance approaches to address them. To do so the project analyses specific MOIP initiatives with sustainability related goals in three selected countries (United Kingdom, Poland and Canada) using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (to identify necessary and/or sufficient links through systematic cross-case comparison) and Process Tracing (to construct key causal mechanisms at the within-case level). The research contributes to a better understanding of MOIP failure risks and their governance, which can in turn help reduce policy failure and increase levels of trust in institutions and public authorities.