The government cannot achieve its missions alone. For a mission-driven approach to succeed, government must lead with purpose and govern in partnership to move further and faster on shared ambitions. Mission Critical 03: Mission-Driven Partnerships with Civil Society is published today in partnership with NPC and Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales.
FGF’s Mission Critical workstream is dedicated to thinking through how the government can operationalise missions as a fundamentally different way of doing things. In this age of ‘polycrisis’, we can’t afford for missions to be old wine in new bottles. As part of our work we’ve been speaking to experts across the country – and across a range of sectors – for their insights on what ‘mission-driven’ government really means in practice.
One thing that’s clear is that the government definitely cannot achieve its missions alone. Deeper partnerships than we’ve seen before are required so that work across the country adds up to much more than the sum of its parts, including the work of civil society organisations. This is the topic of our latest report, Mission Critical 03.
If missions are understood as evidence-based leadership and policy making from the top-down, combined with a culture of innovation – to test and learn – from the bottom up, then civil society organisations should have a major role to play in achieving them. For the very best of these organisations, their knowledge, evidence and insights – often the first to identify a problem which the government is not yet aware of – are central to setting overall direction and defining mission goals. And their trusted relationships with communities, innovative design practices and culture of learning make them crucial to test and learn practices.
But this is by no means true for all of civil society. A politicised view of civil society in recent years has driven a fear of external engagement across Whitehall, and that will take time and effort to pull back from. But civil society organisations must also do their part in adjusting to this new way of working, stepping up to solve problems together with the government, even if they seem beyond their obvious field or sector-based challenges.
We don’t paint an idealistic vision for how things could one day; our focus is on a pragmatic path to making a success of a mission-driven approach, including recommendations that could be implemented as of tomorrow.
And while there has been a consistent shared vision for better partnerships, how we actually get there is – as ever – harder to codify. Through this work we’ve come back time and again to the adage that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ For every structural or process-focused recommendation we put forward, there are examples of partnerships working without those components, or not quite working when they are in place. Even more reason for Whitehall to think of collaboration as both a value to cultivate and a skill to teach.
It is in this spirit that we make six practical recommendations:
- Facilitate and catalyse partnerships from the centre. Relationships should always exist across departments and layers of government. But the centre must take some responsibility for instigating meaningful partnerships – held lightly – with a focus on strategic orchestration rather than outdated modes of command and control.
- Involve civil society throughout the policy development lifecycle. Expertise from civil society should underpin advice to ministers from civil servants. This can be achieved by embracing ‘open policymaking’ and mechanisms beyond standalone formal consultation exercises.
- Strengthen expertise across the civil service. Expectations of civil servants to partner effectively can be formalised through two-way secondments, learning and development, policy appraisal and performance management.
- Involve civil society organisations in the place-based ‘test and learn’ culture of innovation and experimentation which missions require.
- Embrace disagreement in the interests of better policy development and decision-making. Strong challenge and even conflict from civil society should be embraced as a sign of a healthy democracy. Civil society must keep the trust of civil servants when given, recognise political risk, and step up to conversations about transformational change.
- To ‘count’ the economic contribution of civil society, create a satellite account, a collection of data sets linked to, but separate from, the national accounts.
Our aim is to make a practical contribution to efforts across government and civil society to work better together on shared missions.
As with every piece of research, it has raised as many questions as it has answered. Having now looked at how partnership working should operate between government, businesses and trade unions, and between government and civil society, our next priority is to explore what missions could mean for shared leadership of missions across and between sectors, and what that might mean for models of accountability.
And of course, our own approach is rooted in collaboration. Mission Critical 03 is delivered in partnership with NPC, the think tank and consultancy for the social sector, and Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales, an independent charitable foundation. As a forum we have developed, tested and iterated these ideas in partnership with the many people and organisations who contributed. They are listed in full in the acknowledgements on pages 3-4, and we hope they have many more opportunities to come in an era of mission-driven government to work with colleagues across government in the shared pursuit of missions.
