Crafting missions in practice: a formative assessment of public management in European net-zero policy

Despite nearly a decade of engagement with mission-oriented policy, European governments struggle to translate its promises into real outcomes. This paper aims to address this implementation gap by proposing a formative assessment framework centered on missioncraft: the institutional work that public managers perform to support their implementation. Drawing on 54 interviews and official documentation covering 34 net-zero missions led by 12 European governments, the paper identifies three pathways through which public managers pursue mission progress: interventionist, facilitative, and hybrid. The analysis shows that mission-oriented policy implementation is best understood as an experimentalist process shaped by continuous administrative engagement with institutional barriers, rather than as the linear execution of a fixed political design. By linking formative assessment to the everyday practice of public management, the proposed framework provides a diagnostic tool to detect implementation gaps, support strategic learning, and inform adaptive managerial responses.