“Mission Mismanagement: Why Ambitious Strategies like the UK’s National Wealth Fund Need to Take Stakeholder Engagement Seriously”
By Lucas Duncan (Bachelor’s of Arts and Sciences: Health and Environment)
For his dissertation, Lucas Duncan focussed on the UK’s proposed National Wealth Fund as a case study of the increasingly prominent Mission-Oriented Innovation Policies (MOIPs). His research revealed that realising such ambitious and transformative policy visions requires more than capital; it requires robust coordination between diverse stakeholders. His document analysis of the fund’s published strategy suggests that governance mechanisms to manage such coordination are currently lacking but are vital for the success of MOIPs. In response, he explores a potential avenue to ensure coordination: the use of strategic foresight methodologies to stakeholder engagement for missions.
Public investment strategies like Mission-Oriented Innovation Policies (MOIPs) are on the rise. They seek to address complex societal challenges, from decarbonising the energy grid to improving housing affordability. MOIPs are based on the premise that public investment can reduce market risk, crowd in private capital, and shape innovation in the public interest. Aside from public capital, MOIPs require dependable and sophisticated coordination between stakeholders: government departments, private investors, businesses, and civil society. Yet, guidance on how to ensure continuous stakeholder engagement throughout the policy cycle is largely missing in the literature.
Stakeholder Engagement: A Tool or a Ticked Box?
Although the National Wealth Fund strategy claims to prioritise coordination between the public sector and industry, my analysis reveals that its approach to stakeholder engagement lacks methodological rigour.
For example, HM Treasury’s executive summary states that the fund was developed through “extensive engagement across industry” via roundtables and bilateral meetings. Yet no information is provided on the selection criteria for stakeholders, the rationale for their inclusion, or how discussions were facilitated. The fund’s financial allocations were determined “in consultation with industry stakeholders” but again no transparency is provided on how this input was moderated or integrated.
Beyond the instigation of the fund, the government’s strategy fails to detail how stakeholders should be included in ongoing monitoring mechanisms to revise mission targets throughout implementation in response to emerging market conditions.
Moreover, the societal priorities which missions are ultimately meant to address are simply assumed rather than determined through engagement processes. This assumption risks championing misguided objectives from the fund’s instigation.
This opacity is not just a procedural fault; it has practical implications for policy efficacy. Without safeguards to ensure representativeness, stakeholder engagement risks amplifying dominant voices or vested interests.
Unconscious bias, psychosocial group dynamics, or careless selection criteria can distort findings and lead to policies that are misaligned with the actual needs of the innovation ecosystem.
Recognising the harms of weak stakeholder engagement in the National Wealth Fund highlights the urgent need for mission-oriented policymakers to adopt more methodologically rigorous approaches. My research proposes the application of strategic foresight, a practice well-established in other policy contexts but not yet explored in mission-oriented policymaking, as a structured methodology for improving participatory engagement.
Strategic Foresight: A Mission-Compatible Methodology for Stakeholder Engagement
Strategic foresight methods, used in both international and national policy contexts, are designed to help policymakers imagine and prepare for highly uncertain and high-risk futures. These techniques rely on the active participation of relevant stakeholders in ‘scenario-building’ exercises that explore possible futures. Foresight’s emphasis on long-term thinking, systematic inclusion of diverse perspectives, and iterative reassessment of priorities makes it inherently compatible with the governance demands of missions, which must remain adaptive, coordinated, and resilient to uncertainty.
Foresight methods offer three distinct advantages for mission strategies:
- Balancing what should happen with what could happen.
Missions are normative. They focus on goals. Foresight, by contrast, is exploratory. It asks what foreseeably could happen and what risks or barriers might emerge. Embedding foresight within missions helps guard against political myopia and ensures that both design and implementation remain adaptive to uncertainty. - Reducing bias in stakeholder engagement.
Foresight methodologies are purpose-built to ensure representativeness in participation. The Dahrendorf method, developed in 2015 through collaboration between EU foresight units, requires the structured selection of 80 diverse stakeholders using tools like PESTEL analysis. This minimises the risk of policymakers excluding relevant actors due to unconscious bias or institutional blind spots. Similarly, the Delphi method, developed by RAND, anonymises early-stage responses in discussion groups to reduce psychosocial pressures like groupthink. These methods generate more reliable, inclusive insights than informal engagements, ensuring missions are informed by an accurate assessment of the needs of relevant actors. Generating coordination.
Foresight can do more than assess coordination; it can actively create it. Participatory scenario-building fosters shared understanding and behavioural commitment. A compelling example is the Mont Fleur scenarios, which helped shift political dynamics in post-apartheid South Africa by creating a common language around future risks. Famously, then-President de Klerk rejected certain scenarios as undesirable outcomes, signalling their influence. Such processes show how foresight can shape elite behaviour and build consensus in politically fragmented contexts. Given that missions rely on a higher degree of coordination between governmental and private sector actors than traditional policies, the ability of policy monitoring and evaluation processes to not only assess but induce coordination could prove to be an invaluable asset.
Policy Implications
My research offers two important lessons for mission-oriented policymakers. First, missions like the National Wealth Fund will underperform without structured, bias-reducing approaches to stakeholder engagement that ensure robust coordination across government and the private sector. Second, strategic foresight methods are conceptually well-suited to meet this need, in their approaches to selecting diverse stakeholders, minimising bias, and sustaining meaningful dialogue throughout policy implementation. Developing and empirically testing foresight-informed methodologies should be a clear priority to keep missions coordinated, adaptable, and resilient over time.
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