Abstract
This study argues that a decade of mission-oriented policy practice has brought into sharp relief the temporal tensions characterising today’s liberal democracies. The effectiveness of missions rests on sustained political–administrative coordination capable of legitimizing and enabling long-term state intervention. Yet these requirements collide with short electoral cycles, volatile public expectations, and the deepening polarization of democratic politics. Missions therefore illuminate a widening temporal rift in contemporary liberal democracy: between immediate short-term institutional constraints and long-term societal aspirations; between short-term political turnover and long-term administrative continuity; and between the short-term urgency demanded by crises and the slow, patient work required for transformative impact. Missions became popular at a time when institutional short-termism has had a corrosive effect on collective imagination. When public institutions flatten their projection toward the demands of the present, the capacity to conceive, debate, and commit to long-term futures becomes diminished. Missions, in principle, offer a vehicle for renewing that imagination by articulating ambitious societal purposes. Yet in practice they often reveal how fragile, contested, and institutionally weak long-termism has become within liberal-democratic governance. Building on lessons from the past decade, this session asks what kinds of institutional innovations are needed for missions not only to survive but to function as instruments of long-term change. By treating missions as diagnostic tools to understand democracy’s temporal limits, we invite collective reflection on how reconfiguring the temporal structures of liberal democracy—including leadership, administration, and collective action—might strengthen both mission outcomes and the democratic capacities required to govern an uncertain future.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Mission-oriented policy, Strategic foresight, Institutional structures, Public administration
