Rethinking EU's city mission

Summary

This text explores the idea of missions as pushed by the EU, and in particular the mission to create 100 climate neutral and smart cities by 2030, here referred to as the “city mission”.

The focus of the text is on the legitimacy of the EU to drive or encourage these missions in local constituencies. In short: why should communities give priorities to the ambition of eg. climate neutrality, as opposed to other legitimate concerns, such as job security, social cohesion or health, just because the EU says so?

The question of legitimacy matters. The key point with missions is that they should signal a more systemic approach to solving societal challenges, where policies, government departments and indeed broader stakeholder groups, are aligned around a common objective.

But without the broad legitimate support for these missions - by the national and local governments concerned as well as the public, more generally - this broader mobilisation of efforts will fail to materialise, at least in any meaningfully stable way.

Broad legitimacy, in other words, is not something that is nice to have; it is the bedrock on which the whole idea of missions rest.

The text has two parts:

The first part offers a critique of the current approach to missions, and in particular to the city-mission.

The thrust of the critique is that the EU in its approach to missions fails to fully address the legitimacy question. The EU is clearly aware of the general challenge. Thus references to the importance of citizens’ engagement? abound. Much is also made of the claim that missions must be “for and by the people”.

However, not enough is said about what it takes to actually get there. Consequently, as is argued in part 2 of the text, what is the most critical and demanding step in the mission forming process - framing the necessary local missions narratives that can actually strike a real chord in the local context - does not get nearly enough attention and support.

One is left with the sense, that the EU is simply assuming a legitimacy to set the local transition agenda which it does not as a matter of fact have, and hiding this fact under the mantra of “citizens’ engagement”.

To substantiate and illustrate this critique, the text explores Kennedy’s “man-on-the-moon”-mission, as this is widely positioned as the quintessential mission that has informed the EU approach.

Based on this, it is suggested that the reference to this missions actually leads us wrong, in a possibly telling way. What is central to the Kennedy mission is that it played out in the midst of an existential superpower struggle. This gave the US president a unique legitimacy in setting national priorities, which is precisely what the EU currently lacks.

Kennedy’s mission, rather than being an example for the EU to follow, thus rather constitutes an example of what the EU can not follow. Using this mission as an example to inspire EU action, thus tends to divert attention from the real difficulty the EU must grapple with, which is how to make the missions agenda work in the EU context where there is limited central authority.

The second part seeks to build a more positive message on the basis of this critique.

The main argument here is that the legitimacy question, if taken seriously, actually opens up for a reinterpretation of the EU city-missions that points in a new promising but also demanding direction. It is a direction where the focus is on "reading" rather than "leading" cities or communities.

On this interpretation, the mission process must take its starting point not in a centrally formulated EU-mission, as it currently does. Rather, it must take its starting point in ambitions formulated at the city level, where these must express both goals and strategies that are responsive to the specific challenges and priorities that exist in these communities and furthermore are framed so as to have some potential to find resonance in that political context.

This, in turn, leaves it an open question whether, and if so how, the city-missions may come together at the EU-level.

This proposed approach open up a new possible source of legitimacy for missions, where missions are legitimate partly because they reveal new ways forward that make sense to the key stakeholders engaged locally and appear compelling because they help free local stakeholders from limiting political or strategic entanglements which may actually be eminently solvable, if only given due attention from a broader perspective.

Legitimacy, in this sense, comes from empowering local communities to evolve in new more attractive directions. But this approach also puts significant demands on the capacity required at a local level. Needless to say, formulating these alternative actions paths is no simple task. Deep and complicated structural challenges often need to be navigated, and broader politically attractive narratives must be framed. It is a new kind of design challenge, which most local government administrations are ill-equipped to handle, or even support.

As a concluding reflection, the text suggests that what really distinguishes the two understandings of missions are different interpretations of what the key underlying problem is that needs to be addressed. Based on this they end in rather different proposals about what the relative focus on the road ahead should be.

In the current approach to the EU city-mission, what appears to be the implicit diagnosis of the problem is the lack of administrative coordination around a given goal, and furthermore, the shortage of citizens’ engagement in formulating and evolving the strategy to reach that goal. The focus, in this sense, is on solving what could be described as an administrative problem: ie how to more effectively figure our a path to a goal we know we want to reach.

The alternative approach to the EU city-mission proposed here suggests the key problem is that we do not actually have locally shared ideas of how the local goal should be formulated in order to allow us to mobilise effective action. This furthermore suggests that the problem that needs to be addressed is not so much the quantity of citizens’ engagement, as the current approach seems to suggest. The key problem is rather the quality of that engagement and the need for new more sophisticated alternative political actions plans to be formulated and introduced into the political process.

Re-interpreted this way, he missions approach potentially offers very real value because it seeks to expand the realm of political possibilities around which consensus can potentially emerge. By doing so the approach seeks to enrich the political debate and increase the chance that there will be at least one path towards the overall goal around which constituencies’ interest may actually converge. Missions with real legitimacy in this sense need to be discovered, not invented, and it is not a given that such local ambitions with potential legitimacy actually exist.

The fact that there may be no local path with legitimacy that points toward climate neutrality may indeed sound sobering. But by focusing on this problem - which, as will be argued, constitutes the real blockage to effective climate action at a city level - the proposed approach also carries some hope.

Most people, after all, prefer to struggle with really difficult problems, as long as they feel confident these problems are the right ones to struggle with. The alternative, which to most would feel less satisfactory, is to address what are simpler questions to solve, but where there lingers some suspicion that these may not as a matter of fact be the central issues that need to be resolved. The broad claim here is that the EU, member states and indeed cities need to redirect their attention from the latter to the former.

Part 1 - A critique of EU’s city-mission

1.1. Missions and the challenge of legitimacy

The idea of missions

The idea of ”missions” has taken on a central role in EUs innovation and development agenda. They are defined as “systemic public policies that draw on frontier knowledge to attain specific goals”. More generally, they are supposed to serve as rallying cries that help frame ambitious, coordinated and targeted government interventions in the economy which bring a multitude of interventions together around well defined goals. As such, missions, it is claimed, are supposed to constitute “a new way to?bring concrete solutions to some of our greatest challenges”: climate adaptation; beating cancer; racing to climate neutrality, etc.

A key part of the novelty of missions is that they are supposed to reshape the way the state operates, away from a siloed approach towards a more effective coordination of both government agencies and policy tools. Indeed, they are supposed to “connect all relevant actors through new forms of partnerships for co-design and co-creation by focussing on targets that require multiple sectors and actors to solve.”? In this way, “mission-oriented innovation has the possibility of leading to system- wide transformation.”

It is ambitious. But as Mariana Mazzucato, one of the key architects behind EUs missions puts it, “Finding ways to steer economic growth, and the European policy agenda, is difficult but necessary”. She adds: “Missions are a powerful tool to do this.”

The question of legitimacy

The level of ambition in the missions agenda clearly brings with it questions of legitimacy. In short: who are the missions for and why would they support them?

Here it is important to note that missions are essentially political and must be: to coordinate government policies and indeed government departments around one tangible objective implies that this objective be given some priority over other objectives. To push one mission is thus not to push another. In this sense, missions are no different from other kinds of political programmes and need democratic support.

Mazzucato admits this: “While EU investments in research and innovation are a basic condition, a broader political commitment to align policy objectives at both the EU and Member State level will be critical to implement a successful mission.” It can be added that in countries with significant devolution of power, such as Sweden, this need for policy alignment will in many cases also extend to the municipal level.

Herein lies a basic dilemma. One the one hand, the goals of missions are supposed to be set at an an EU level, as they “cannot only have relevance for the population of one Member State, or a small sub-set of the European population” and must instead “touch the lives of, or inspire, a significant part of the European population.” One the other hand, to be successful, mission require political commitment with broad popular support also at the member state and local government level. A gradual alignment of national and local priorities and interests in support of the missions thus seems essential to success - but how is this alignment supposed to happen?

The question is general, but it is highlighted in particular, by the EU mission no 4: 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030. The reason is that the transformation of a city is much more of a context specific task than, say, “beating cancer”. Furthermore, the transformation of a city is likely to impact inhabitants in a much more direct way than the ambitious research or medical efforts required to “beat cancer”. The general legitimacy dilemma thus takes on a very specific form in the case of city-missions: why should we expect these communities to take on this mission of climate neutrality in competition with realistic alternatives? And without clear support from the community, where is the legitimacy supposed to come from to re-shape the state in one direction rather than another?

(See. Mazzucato M. In Mission-Oriented Research & Innovation in the European Union, A problem-solving approach to fuel innovation-led growth)

The limits of what “citizens’ engagement” can do

In the EU documentation on missions, references to “citizens engagement” abound.? Clearly, these references are there precisely to address the legitimacy question and to ensure that the missions are “for and by the people”, as the official framing of the city mission puts it. But it is not clear how citizens engagement as such would give legitimacy to the political prioritisation that the goals formulated in the missions imply. After all, recent years have shown that there are plenty of populist forms of citizens engagement - often powered by new technologies - that do not translate into political mobilisation; or if they do, that fail to confer any legitimacy.

The question is particularly challenging as a mission such as climate neutrality may well bring out what at least superficially appears to be a direct contradictions with another possible missions that could also be pushed locally, such as eg fighting fuel poverty. In other worlds, there may well be clear political disagreements and possibly conflicting goals at the local level which hold back action. If proactive state engagement is required to build support for the required alignment of local priorities, it is unclear where the legitimacy of that state action is supposed to come from.

More generally, what seems to be required is an account of where our existing constitutional arrangements and processes are supposed to fail us and thus what more specific gap in these arrangements that the “missions approach” is supposed to fill. After all, our existing structures for representative democracy have evolved precisely to ensure legitimacy to the kind of concentrated government efforts which missions seek to bring about. At the most basic level, the legitimacy of missions would thus seem to depend on the extent to which they constitute a convincing response to a convincing formulation of a broad democratic problem.

1.2. Reflecting on the legitimacy of Kennedy’s moonshot

Well crafted visions can inspire

One place to start, in the quest to understand better the basis for legitimacy of the EU-missions , is to go back and look at President Kennedy’s mission “to put a man on the moon and bring him back again before the end of this decade”. This is widely regarded as the quintessential mission and is frequently referred to also in the EU documentation, to the extent that missions are sometimes referred to simply as “moonshots”. Thus understanding what the “man-on-the-moon” project involved and how it arose may help throw some light on how we should understand the EU-missions, and more specifically where their support and legitimacy are supposed to come from.

In this context, what is worth noting with President Kennedy’s missions, is that it did not instantly resonated with voters. A Gallup pool taken shortly after Kennedy announced the mission to congress in 1961 indicated that 58% of Americans were opposed to the idea. Kennedy in this sense did not in any simply way respond to public opinion. In hindsight, it rather appeared like he was shaping public opinion. This is also how he himself described the role he played, in his famous Texas-speech in September 1962:

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win”

Kennedy, of course, offers broader reason for why people in the US should support the idea of putting a man on the moon. He alludes in his speech not only to the existential threat of losing the arms race to the Soviet Union, but also to what the US is really about. In the speech, delivered at Rice University Campus, Texas, he also tellingly includes a local sports reference to the Rice - Texan sports rivalry. It is in the very nature of the US - and indeed in the very nature of Texas and Rise - to take up this fight for supremacy in space, the suggestion seems to be. The words are carefully chosen, partly to flatter but partly also to strike a chord: to remind Americans what they truly believe themselves to be about.

At a first glance, it would thus seem that Kennedy by putting a bold vision on the table and reminding Americans of “what they really are” triggers the nation to step up. This would indeed make it seem as if the goal formulated served “to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills”. That reading of what happened would also seem to vindicate what seems to be a core tenet of mission in the EU: the idea that a government formulating an ambitious goal can bring not only political support for that goal, but also give the mission some legitimacy by striking a certain authentic cord with voters.

Inspiring visions must resonate in a broader context

Clearly, though, there is a lot more behind the “man on the moon mission” other than Kennedy’s inspirational speeches and his coordinated mobilisation of government efforts, which may suggest that also other lessons should be drawn from this mission. In particular, Kennedy’s mission and the way it served to mobilise public opinion can not be understood without considering the rather unique international context of the early 60s and in particular the role play by the Cold War. 1957 saw the launch of Sputnik. The Cuban missile crises would play out just a year after Kennedy announced his mission. A few years later - In 1964 - US entered Vietnam on a large scale. The voters in other words did not need any reminding of the realities of the super power rivalry. The stage was in this sense very clearly set for an ambitious idea that would boost the US in this struggle.

In view of this broader context, it seems less obvious that Kennedy should be understood as “launching” a new mission by formulating an inspiring idea. Maybe he should rather be interpreted as extending an already established mission - that of defeating the Soviet Union - to the new arena of space. The backdrop of the Cold War thus somewhat muddles the question of whether Kennedys formulation of the “man-o-the-moon”-mission really served to seed change, or whether he was rather channeling change pressures that already existed. Put differently, should Kennedy be understood primarily as a screwed interpreted of where the US nation was at the time, as much as a visionary leader that shaped the US political landscape?

Historians are unlikely to agree on a simple answer on what precise role Kennedy as a political leader played here. What should be clear though is that the distinction between reading where a place is going and leading it in that direction may not always be straight forward. Understanding what the nation or a constituency really “wants to do” may in this sense be more important than seeking to push it down a new path.

1.3. Drawing the lessons for the EU city-mission

Three general lessons from Kennedy’s moonshot

Three overall lessons emerge from the Kennedy example, which complicate the simple claim that well crafted visions by themselves can serve to inspire action, or at least stable lasting action such as ambitious coordinated public innovation efforts.

The first lesson is that what it really takes to lay the ground for a successful missions, is to blend carful interpretation of what there is (“reading”), with just the right dose of optimisms of what could become (“leading”). Too much of the latter makes for an unsustainable effort, where the message fails to resonate with voters deeper interests; too much of the former, and the campaign tilts towards academic analysis that may appear superficially attractive, but which fails to ignite the deeper spirits of voters and trigger their deeper motivations to act.

The second lesson is that what balance to strike between “reading” and “leading”, in the parlance above, crucially depends on what prior mandate exists for a president, a parliament or a government agency to set new ambitious national priorities. An executive with a strong prior legitimacy to lead, like Kennedy, can set national objectives with rather less attention given to reading the specific situation in different constituencies. In contrast, an executive with little prior legitimacy must play the opposite game, and focus acute attention on reading where different constituencies are going and thus how they can be mobilised for action.

The third lesson is that the Cold War provided Kennedy with a rather unique context within which he could lead. While the US was an very divided country at the time, being in the midst of the civil rights movement, the existential arms struggle with the USSR also gave Washington very significant legitimacy in shaping national objectives and projects, in particular connected to defence and foreign interests.

The EU must focus on reading, rather than leading

What is brought out by this reading of Kennedy’s mission, is the sharp contrast between Washington in 1961 and Brussels in 2023. While climate change offers a challenge with a similar existential dimension as that of the cold war, the threat is not perceived as as immediate. Brussels, partly as a result, does not have anything near the same legitimacy in taking on big project or setting national priorities in the way Washington did in the 1960s. For this reason, the references to Kennedy’s moonshot may partly be misleading, as the particularities of the Kennedy case tends to hide legitimacy concerns that in the EU case should really be brought to the fore.

More generally, it would also be mistaken to think that it would be enough in the EU case to merely formulate an inspiring ambitions to motive people in cities across the EU to step up and adopt and drive ambitious action agendas. In some cities an alignment may already exist to take ambitious action towards climate neutrality, and in such cases the EU mission may well add som extra spark - but that is a far cry from seeing it as something that can help mobilise an ambitious and broad based change agenda. In short: the EU simply does not have the legitimate authority to set priorities for cities, which is what its current approach to the city missions implies that it does.

Importantly, the conclusions above does not mean that the EU’s city-missions should be abolished. It does suggest however that the approach be reconsidered in a way that does not assume the legitimacy question away, but rather places it as the key question to resolve.? What this would mean is explored further below, but put very succinctly, it involves a shift from a focus on leading, to one that is centrally focused on reading where local constituencies are and what they presently want. While this may appear like a small shift in perspective, it has some rather far reaching implications.

2. A reinterpretation of EU’s city-mission

2.1. A focus on reading rather than leading

Towards a diversity of local city-missions

The basic conclusion above is that with a limited central authority to push through projects, EU-missions must instead be responsive to local constituencies and seek to harness and build on the momentum and legitimacy these provide. Rather than assuming the legitimacy to drive change from the centre, the focus would instead be on trying to identify and harness the legitimate change pressures that already exist in the various cities in the EU. This is what is means by a focus on reading rather than leading.

A practical result of such a shift in approach is that city-missions are likely to take on different forms in different places. The reason is that different histories, different infrastructural challenges, different economic structures and different political agendas set rather different constraints in different places and also open up different avenues for action. Some cities may consequently face real opportunities to push certain missions, that in other places would find no room at all.

At a superficial level this makes immediate sense.

European cities that are deeply embedded in the tourist economy - which is the case for many European cities - may, for example, formulate vision of climate neutrality that pick up on locally grounded fears over the effect worsening heat waves could have on losing tourist income. The resulting local mission, may emphasise clearly visible interventions that not only support the journey towards climate neutrality, but which also help brand the city in a way that boost its basic appeal as a tourist destination.

In European cities where industry dominates over tourism as a source of income, the local version of a mission of climate neutrality may look very different. Here the local mission may be framed around the need to transition an old industrial base from fossil fuel dependency towards renewable energy to avoid the risk of losing jobs and key economic assets. The interventions prioritised in this city may be invisible to visitors, but crucial to boosting the competitive edge of local industrial actors.

In both cases the missions may point towards the same very broad outcome: a significant boost of efforts to become climate neutral and smart. But the priorities within that broad ambition and the more specific argumentation that seek to build support for the proposed interventions may indeed be very different, and the political framings may be radically different. In both cases, furthermore, the framing may refer only very indirectly to the goal of climate neutrality as this goal must instead be subsumed under the issues and concerns that dominate locally. It is in this sense a process where the issue of climate neutrality is subsumed and incorporated into the established rhetoric of the local community; not the other way around.

The legitimacy of missions may thus come at the expense of the neat simplicity of the five missions formulated by Brussels, as well as at the expense of the sense of central control. This however would not be an unusual trade off.

A new focus on discovering missions

This focus on reading a community and securing local adaptation of a missions, suggests that the EU city-mission should not really - in its present form - be thought of as a mission at all, at least not in the sense of Kennedy’s “man-on-the-moon”. Rather, it should be thought of as a broad goal, which for its success requires a second step, which is that a series of local missions are formulated at the city level and that these in turn are successfully implemented.

Importantly, the formulation of a mission that captures voters imagination and stirs action is unlikely to be the general goal or story proposed at an EU-level. This is the difference to the Kennedy mission, where it was precisely the President’s framing of the ambition, that is held out as the motivational engine. Instead, in the proposed reinterpretation, the formulation of the mission likely to really matter is the contextually sensitive and locally based narrative of how to get to that broad goal.

The underlying claim here is that the EU city-mission, to get a grip in the local context, must express interests that have a real basis in that community - its history, geography, culture and politics - and furthermore give some hints of what this broader context may mean for their future direction of this city.? Only at this point can political action be mobilised and local legitimacy emerge.? The mission agenda is in this sense put on its head, putting cities in the lead and pushing the centre to follow.

An implication of this view is that politician or more broadly government bureaucrats in the process of implementing the missions, should not primarily be thought of as in the business of launching something. They should rather, at least in the initial phases of the process, be understood as being in the business of trying to reveal something important about the community, which in turn points that community in a new direction.

2.2. New capacity needs at the local level

New roles and demands on local government

Reading EU-missions in this way helps highlight a crucial and challenging step in the EU mission-formulating process, which gets limited if any attention in the current EU missions approach. This is the step when a set of initial versions of local mission statements must be formulated and inserted into the local political process where they can be tested and questioned by key stakeholders. Through such a political process, some legitimate consensus may form around one of the action plans. If that happens, a local mission with real support and legitimacy may emerge. But it is of course not a given that this will happen.

Importantly, the task of formulating these initial initial ideas is clearly not a task that is reducible to “citizens engagement”. Quite the opposite, it requires a rather serious investigation into the history, the geography, the infrastructure and economic, cultural and political logic of the city. Once such initial ideas are formulated, they clearly need to be tested against citizen’s views and values. The engagement of citizens in this dialogue is also likely to take on a much productive form if is is based around such already well articulated political ideas. Importantly, though, effective citizens engagement should in this case be seen as primarily the output of an effective missions process, not the input.

Needless to say, this proposed approach is demanding. Formulating the initial “prototype missions” is not a simple task. As hinted at above, two criteria would have to be met for these early proposals to serve as serve as prototype ideas that can potentially take on the role of missions. Firstly, they would have to be based on real empirical analysis, and highlight a real course of action for the community in question, ie. some “truth” about that community. If not, they should be rejected as populist proposals and because of that be ruled out as lacking in legitimacy. Secondly, the initial vision statement must be framed so as to at least have a fighting chance of actually evoking support from the broader community. If not, it will merely represent a theoretical option, and the citizens’ engagement around it would be academic.

The real value of the missions approach

Formulated this way, it becomes clear that it is not a given that this process will work and that these local missions towards climate neutrality can be formulated so that the two conditions above are met. Indeed, there may be no simple truth about these communities that can be revealed so as to motivate them to act in accordance with the broader EU-agenda. A further consequence of this might be that there is no democratically legitimate way to reach the EU goal of 100 climate neutral cities. While it may be possible to push through the legislation or the government interventions that would push cities in this direction, it might be that such efforts can not at the same time be “for and by the people”.

This somewhat discouraging suggestion does however also point towards a real value that a well run mission process could bring. This is to provide a process that seeks to exhaust what possible avenues for action exist that actually point towards the broad goal of climate neutrality and which have at least some fighting chance of having legitimacy and winning voters’ support. A mission process should under this interpretation not primarily be thought of along the lines of Kennedy’s man on the moon mission, where forceful leadership from the centre “serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills”. The mission process should rather be understood as a exploratory search for new avenues of action that were previously hidden to both voters, bureaucrats and politicians but which, once revealed, have to be taken seriously and which may, in the best of cases, also carry their own mobilising and self-legitimising logic.

2.3. A firmer theoretical ground for local missions

A realist grounding of missions

Missions - according to the re-interpretation suggested here -? should thus be thought of as latent opportunities for cities to evolve in new directions that allow them to reach new ambitious goals, such as eg climate neutrality, but which furthermore reveals overlapping interests among key constituencies in the city which allows broad political support for such action to emerge. “Missions”? thus represent opportunities for communities to make evolutionary leaps that are, in a certain sense hardwired in their history, geography as well as in their social, cultural and political context. The implicit claim, as this shows, is that missions to count as missions must have some realist foundation.

Importantly, to say that missions to count as missions must have some realist basis does certainly not imply that the evolution of a city is hardwired in its path, or that there is only one or a couple of “right” paths for a city. Indeed, there may be a very large number of potential evolutionary paths for a city that are radically different but which all share this realist grounding. As such one could image a city formulating a large number of very diverse missions, all with the requisite realist grounding.

The claim does, however, imply, that there are some avenues for action that lack this realist grounding; in other words, that there are possible evolutionary step for a city that simply do not make sense. Formulating proposals that lack this realist grounding, does not actually enrich the quality of the policy making process or indeed the broader quality of the democratic discourse; instead, it risks undermining this quality by presenting as real opportunities courses of action that may not be attainable. Weeding out policy proposals that lack realist grounding is thus helpful, not because it helps us find any pre-determined “right path”, but because it helps us firstly avoid populist excesses and secondly overburdening what is already a heavily fragmented and divided political space.

The need for a new research agenda

The idea of a realist grounding for missions points towards the need for a new research agenda and more generally for local universities to step up in the mission formulating process. As argued above, a key source of legitimacy in the EU city-mission must be the ability of mission statements to reveals some new truth about a community that in turn help these communities see new possible avenues going forward. But for such claims to be legitimate, they must clearly be based on some kind of methodical investigation of a community. This in turn suggest the need for some kind of research-based or scientific framework within which such an investigation can take place.

A key challenge here is the necessarily very broad framing of such a research agenda, for it to have a chance to capture the multitude of insights that need to be considered in such a mission formulating process. The challenge would be not only to bring together very diverse academic disciplines, but also to bridge theoretical inquiry with experience based understanding. While demanding to realise, there is not nothing inherently new in this challenge and there is plenty of experience of both inter- and trans-disciplinary research programmes to build on.?

The ambition does however point towards the need for new effective partnerships between local government, business as well as academia. The immediate purpose of this would be to direct more substantial institutional support to methodical investigations into the identity and indeed the options going forward for the diverse communities that make up Europe. As such, this proposed reinterpretation of EUs city-mission should at the broadest level be understood as a cry for taking place seriously - and for the EU to show genuine respect and curiosity for the multitude of historically embedded communities that ultimately make up its identity and bestow it with whatever legitimacy is has.

3. Concluding reflection

Repositioning the underlying problem

Implicit in this proposed re-interpretation of EUs city-missions is an understanding of what is lacking in our established political structures and processes and which thus justifies the EU missions agenda. According to this interpretation, the problem with our local political processes is not so much the lack of citizens engagement per se. The problem instead is the fragmented nature of the engagement with citizens, and more specifically, the fact that this fragmentation prevents more worked-through and coherent interpretations of a community and its possible futures to emerge. What is missing, in other words, is not primarily the quantity of attention citizens give to political issues, but the quality of the deliberative process that directs this attention and evaluates alternatives.

This proposed reinterpretation of missions thus repositions the underlying democratic problem compared to how the established EU mission process seems to be positioning it.

In the current EU-approach, the key problem that the missions are supposed to address is primarily the lack of administrative coordination around what is perceived as an already well defined goal, as well as the need to engage citizen’s around this goal so as to secure both support and legitimacy. As such, the tendency is to position the problem as a technical or administrative problem that can largely be handled by civil servants at a local government level, be that in partnership with business and citizens. In short: the problem is presented as the problem of how to effectively execute on an already agreed political goal.

In the reinterpretation of missions proposed here, the problem is instead seen as largely political. The role of the mission process in this picture is to inform the political process better by feeding well articulated and empirically sound narratives into this process so as to expand the realm of political possibilities the process can consider. Importantly, these new narratives would also need to have a degree of sophistication that would make them unlikely to emerge on their own. The local government administration - in partnership with local universities and other stakeholders -? would thus be filling an important void in the political process that undermines its quality, which is ultimately what provides the legitimacy to the whole process

Needless to say, citizens’ engagement must play a crucial role in formulating and evolving these narratives. But citizens’ engagement, on this view, is very far from a panacea that solves the legitimacy question. It should rather be seen as a tool that helps assess and evolve local narratives that have already been given some prior form. Furthermore, the strong focus on citizen’s engagement in the EU-documents on missions may actually constitute a problem, as it risks distorting our understanding of what missions need to be to actually serve the purpose intended.