The moon and the ghetto, revisited
Societal missions aren’t weaker versions of technology missions – they are a different kind of undertaking, with their own logic
In 1977 the economist Richard Nelson asked a question that still hasn’t been answered: if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we solve the problems of the ghetto? The Moon and the Ghetto was a warning that the Apollo model of big budgets, clear technical goals and engineering discipline doesn’t carry over easily to social problems. Nearly fifty years later, and with more than 300 missions under way worldwide, that warning still matters.
Most of the global mission portfolio still sits in technology and competitiveness: net zero, energy, materials, health technologies. The hardest and arguably most important missions, though, are the ones that sit outside that frame. Missions on children’s and young people’s inclusion, wellbeing and opportunity are more systemic, more dependent on context and messier in cause and effect than almost any technology mission. In this field, “soft” is the new “hard.”
The three of us met at the OECD Mission Forward Conference in Paris in September 2026 to compare two of Europe’s efforts to take on this challenge: Norway’s mission on the inclusion of children and young people (led by Solveig), and the UK’s Opportunity Mission, part of the R&D Missions Accelerator Programme (led by Anne-Marie). Christian – who works globally with designing and implementing missions in public institutions, universities and philanthropies – moderated the session. This essay sets out what we learned from putting the two side by side.
Two missions, two diagnoses
The two missions start from different diagnoses, and those diagnoses shape everything that follows.
In Norway, we see a learning and implementation crisis, not a knowledge crisis. Norway knows a great deal about what harms and helps children and young people. What it lacks is systemic experimentation, including with policy instruments, and the collective capacity to act on what it knows. Put bluntly, the system itself is producing exclusion. So the mission’s job isn’t only to coordinate existing actors – it has to build collective capacity across them.
In the UK, the starting point is the stubborn persistence of disadvantage: too often, where you are born is where you will die. The Opportunity Mission covers the whole life course, “from labour ward to the labour market.” Its client is the Department for Education, which points to the areas where it is struggling, and the mission then applies a DARPA-like approach of placing “best bets.” There are four current focus areas: special educational needs; the home learning environment (parenting, play and neighbourhood safety); young people not in education, employment or training (NEETs); and entry-level work in the age of AI. The mission’s role is to bring a sprinkle of moonshot ambition to a tough system where many people are exhausted.
The resources differ enormously. The Norwegian mission works with about NOK 4m a year, which is very little set against the government's ambitions. The UK figure is in the order of £500m. That contrast is itself a finding: societal missions are often expected to deliver systemic change on budgets that would be a rounding error in an energy or defence mission.
In the course of our conversation in Paris, four shared insights emerged about what it takes to lead societal missions in complex systems. They point to a different logic for mission-oriented policy: one that starts not with technology or singular solutions, but with systems, relationships, learning and place.
Social missions need a different theory of innovation
In both missions, innovation looks very different from products and technology solutions.
In Norway, a key insight is that the innovation that matters is institutional, behavioural, relational and social. It emerges from interactions, and it often lies not in any single service but in the relationships between services. Because solutions depend so much on context, simple replication and scaling are hard. The key question is therefore not “does the intervention work?” but what works for whom, under which conditions, and what would allow it to become everyday practice? Implementation itself has to be iterative and experimental.
The UK mission is deliberately tactical. It looks for spaces where others aren’t acting rather than claiming to change the whole system. Because the field is causally messy, a societal mission has to make more but smaller bets than missions focused on economic growth. It funds a variety of interventions aimed at different parts of the system, narrows them down to the promising ones, and then will work to scale or spread. There is also a structural constraint: the institutions involved often lack the capacity to absorb large sums.
A learning mission needs adaptive resources. If the path cannot be fully specified in advance, neither can all the capabilities or funding needs required along the way. Missions therefore need some room to shift not only their hypotheses and interventions as they learn, but also the expertise and resources available to pursue them. This does not mean creating a large parallel organisation or funding everything from the centre. Most resources will remain distributed across existing institutions and sectors.
This matters particularly in the spaces between established mandates, funding streams and institutions, where systemic problems often persist precisely because no single actor owns either the problem or the means to address it. Some flexible capacity is needed to mobilise specialist expertise, bridge gaps between existing funding streams, and act on opportunities or barriers as they emerge. Otherwise, a mission can learn what needs to change without having the means to do anything about it.
Work involving children also needs a humane timeline. Interventions between birth and school entry take time to show results – and mission cycles have to respect that.
Mission leadership means building relationships
Both missions depend on leaders who can hold a system together without controlling it. In Norway, Solveig’s role is best described as “lubricating the system.” In practice it has three levels. First, broad listening: some 270 meetings during the mission’s first year with external actors about how they see the challenge, plus workshops with researchers, counties, young people and ministries to find the structural challenges and the “forklifts”: the points where one intervention can lift several parts of the mission at once. Second, joining experiments that actors are already running, as a learning partner. Third, simply making connections.
The approach builds policy from below and tests it with the top, in a process that is iterative, not linear. Governance runs through a high-level group that includes the ministries. It is backed by a recent white paper that redefines the school as an arena of belonging as well as of learning.
In the UK, challenge directors like Anne-Marie were chosen because they came from the system and brought relationships and trust. The role is to be a “super-connector” while respecting the system the mission works with. The mission’s governance includes an implementation advisory group of people known for making things happen, whose job is to help ideas survive contact with reality. Its funding model uses organisation-agnostic “contracts for innovation.” One example is a small charity working with a renowned university as a subcontractor. That reversal of the usual hierarchy between research and practice is instructive.
Put place first, and treat participation as a design problem
We agree that engagement has to be real, not symbolic. The Norwegian mission treats children and young people as knowledge holders. Involving young people is feasible; involving younger children is much harder.
The mission ran a full-day workshop with early-childhood researchers, youth councils and civil society to work out how to build their perspectives into the mission. Together with the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), young people with lived experience, including of the criminal justice system, have designed installations that express that experience. They will be shown at an art institution from November 2026 to January 2027 and will serve as a meeting space. One figure explains why this matters: only four per cent of ideas proposed by young people in Norway’s local and regional youth councils are implemented.
We also need to push further: for instance, what would it mean to take infants’ voices seriously? And we should heed a necessary corrective raised at the conference: it isn’t children's job to carry this. Adults created the problems.
In the UK, the principle is to work where the energy and the need are. Bradford, the UK’s youngest city, has major challenges in children’s education and a rich linked health and education dataset. One simple example, “Glasses in Classes,” found that many children struggling to read simply couldn’t see. This approach was rolled out across a number of additional locations after success in Bradford. The approach emerging across the UK is “test, learn, grow”: start in a place, try things out, then decide where the next testbed should go. We see testing as a moral imperative, within proper research ethics. The mission is a universal offer with targeted elements, and the government has given a strong steer to focus on the link between social class and outcomes.
Question the targets, and measure how the system changes
The Norwegian government has set six concrete, measurable goals for the mission. These raise an uncomfortable question: why those targets? Take the goal of raising participation in organised leisure activities. It could easily be met by enrolling more middle-class children, which would hit the target and miss the point. Norway’s welfare agency NAV has data on low-income families, and data on leisure participation also exists, so the right children could be targeted. But nobody is asking that question, and that is the first place to intervene.
More broadly, we argue for moving from results-based management towards meaningful indicators of system change. Are relationships shifting? Are resources being reallocated? Are actors sharing responsibility differently? Have agencies stopped sending parents from office to office? Is the system moving from “me” to “us”?
This calls for investment in evaluation infrastructure as a long-term asset. In the UK, the mission uses R&D funding, works across the programme’s five missions, invests in What Works Centres, and is piloting a new evidence and improvement partnership, including in informal domains like parenting. The UK has a strong what works movement – but going further for children and young people now requires more innovation, not just more evidence about existing practice.
Two further principles matter. First, being honest about the theory of change: contribution rather than attribution. A theory of change should work as a boundary object, clear enough to say what you are doing and why, and flexible enough to adapt. Second, taking learning seriously. There is plenty of talk about monitoring, but much less about how learning turns into action, and who is on the learning journey with us.
Mission-oriented policy
Richard Nelson’s question still stands: bringing a human to the moon and back alive is hard, but making an impact on persistent societal challenges is harder. But our two missions suggest the start of an answer. Societal missions aren’t weaker versions of technology missions. They are a different kind of undertaking, with their own logic:
They build capacity as well as solutions. The core problem is often implementation and collective capacity, not a lack of knowledge.
They manage portfolios of many small bets in causally messy fields, while respecting humane timelines.
Their leaders are trusted connectors from inside the system, not outside experts.
They are grounded in place. Participation is a design challenge, where citizens are knowledge holders, without being made responsible for fixing the system that we professionals broke.
They measure how the system changes, not just output targets, and treat theories of change and learning processes as strategic tools.
Still, the imbalance in ambition and resources is hard to ignore. If governments want missions on youth inclusion and opportunity to deliver, they will need to invest in them, and learn from them, as seriously as they do in missions on energy or industrial competitiveness. The moon was the easy part.
Solveig Korum is Special Advisor and Chair of the Task Force on Inclusion of Children and Youth at the Research Council of Norway. Anne-Marie Canning is Opportunity Mission Challenge Director at UKRI. Christian Bason is the co-founder of Transition Collective.