Missions and Cohesion Policy: Living separate or dancing together?

This paper explores avenues for cross-fertilisation between the mission-oriented approach (MOA) and Cohesion Policy (CP). It argues in favour of mutual policy learning between CP and MOA to address their shortcomings: CP is facing a gradual erosion of its identity, whereas MOA is missing a territorial perspective. MOA could offer a theoretical blueprint for re-organizing and streamlining CP’s priorities around few missions, linking more explicitly its objectives to major societal challenges so as to reinforce its rationale and revive political ownership, using directionality to strengthen the result-orientation dimension, blending top-down and bottom-up approaches to streamline the vertical and horizontal governance relations. MOA can benefit from adopting CP’s thematic focus on objectives that can be adapted to territorial contexts and into regional policy agenda, embedding CP’s goal of maximising equity and solidarity into its mission, drawing on CP’s agenda to increase educational attainment within EU regions and redistributive approach to foster the full potential of all EU regions to tackle societal challenges.