What if mission-based working in local government enabled us, not just to respond to market forces, but to help shape them?
Across the country, councils and strategic authorities recognise that the big challenges facing their places cannot be tackled either in isolation or by government, national or local, alone.
Our recent paper and toolkit, Places on a Mission, written in partnership with Inner Circle Consulting, explores how councils and strategic authorities are using missions and mission-led ways of working to bring together coalitions of the public, voluntary, community and social enterprise and private sectors, alongside communities, to pioneer new approaches to tackling complex local challenges.
This emerging link between mission-led local government and market-shaping is still relatively underdeveloped in practice, but it points towards a potentially significant shift in the role of the local state, particularly in the context of deepening devolution and future fiscal reform. It is a question we will be exploring further at this year's Stronger Things, in a conversation about the role of missions in shaping stronger local economies.
In our research, we found a growing movement of councils and strategic authorities using missions as a catalyst for institutional reform and the culture, mindset and ways of working needed to underpin it.
Missions frameworks are also prompting local governments and their partners to rethink approaches to place-based working and the conditions needed to deepen its impact.
The role of local government as a market-shaper was a theme that stood out as feeling both important and pressing – given the interlocking nature of our biggest economic, social and environmental challenges – but relatively nascent in practice.
Drawing on the work of Mariana Mazzucato, market-shaping in this context means government institutions creating the conditions and incentives for the market to take action on big societal challenges.
In workshops, we explored how councils and strategic authorities operationalise their role as system stewards and convenors, enabling others to take action on missions. In the case of the private sector, participants identified community wealth-building and strategies to support the growth of the social economy as routes to aligning economic development with social and environmental goals. We also discussed opportunities to align procurement and commissioning processes with missions, regulatory levers and the role of the public sector in de-risking innovation opportunities.
In recent decades, the role that local governments have been able to take in shaping their local economies has been uneven and often constrained. While strategic authorities are increasingly taking on a stronger role in this space, the picture across England remains patchy and approaches are often shaped as much by national growth priorities and funding regimes as by local ambition.
But in the context of deepening and maturing devolution, alongside growing conversations about fiscal devolution, there appears to be more space for councils and strategic authorities to experiment with a broader role as market-shapers and stewards of their local economies.
In Gateshead, the council has been using a missions-based approach to refresh its economic development strategy as a means of ensuring that the strategy feels tangible and rooted in place.
Camden LBC has established a Community Wealth Fund: a £30m social investment fund, aligned with the We Make Camden missions, to support businesses and other organisations which can bring a financial return while also bringing positive benefits to people and communities in Camden. The Fund is currently focused on Camden's diversity and young people missions. Crucially, participation is at the heart of this approach, with a youth panel helping to make decisions for the Youth Fund, and a group of 1,000 diverse residents making decisions for the Diversity Fund.
At Stronger Things, our speakers will imagine how local governments of the future could use missions to galvanise partners to build local economies that both reflect the strengths of communities and support them to thrive. Together, we will explore what a bigger role for local government in shaping local and regional economies could look like, where the promising practice is now, and the opportunities opened up by local government reform and maturing devolution.
As we enter a period of profound change, questions about the future role of the local state are becoming harder to ignore.
Stronger Things is where those conversations come to life, bringing practitioners, policy-makers and partners together to explore what the next era of local government could look like in practice. Join us there.
Grace Pollard is head of policy and insights at New Local
