Mariana without borders

What would it take to scale Mariana Mazzucato’s “mission thinking” to a global stage?

Hassan Damluji, December 2022

Reading books that reinforce your worldview is comforting. But enlightenment requires a degree of masochism. As with workplace feedback – daggers delivered with a smile – it is only when you are asked to re-evaluate your own basic goodness that you will take meaningful steps towards a deeper understanding.  

Such was my experience of reading Mariana Mazzucato’s Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism (Allen Lane, 2020). Rewarding precisely for how painful it was for me to read.  

The main problem with the world today – or at least with society’s ability to tackle its problems – is, according to Mazzucato, governments losing the self-confidence (and the confidence of others) that they should lead and drive social change. Instead, they have outsourced the thinking to management consultants like McKinsey: overpriced snake-oil salesmen with flashy PowerPoints and no substance. These consultants, cheerleaders of a decades long movement to “get government out of the way” and make it function more like a business, have driven the outsourcing, downsizing, de-skilling and overall retreat of the public sector. In its place they have built an edifice of waste, strategic drift and the transfer of value from public into private hands. This has left us without the tools to tackle our greatest challenges, like climate change, urban renewal and aging. 

In 2008, aged 25, having just completed my master’s degree, I launched my career proper. Having spent almost all my life as a student, I knew little of how the world, and governments, worked. But I was determined to help rebuild Iraq and the broader Middle East, and I figured that becoming an expert in education reform would be a handy way of contributing. So I looked for the job that would best combine a good income, general training, and specific opportunities to get involved in education reform work in the Middle East. By far the best option that I came across was as a consultant at McKinsey’s Dubai office, where a growing number of education projects formed part of a booming public sector advisory business. I spent the next 5 years, working across the Middle East region, as well as in the UK, introducing market-based reforms, outsourcing programs and other initiatives – many of which Mazzucato would have loathed – with a goal of improving the quality of free, public education.  

Now, I know for a fact that my colleagues and I were passionate people trying to do the right thing. We were not selling snake oil. But is Mazzucato right that the philosophy on which I was apprenticed has done more harm than good? 

The outcomes certainly don’t prove her wrong. Over the last decade I have learned for myself much of what Mazzucato powerfully argues. Outsourcing was meant to introduce competition to drive down prices and drive up quality. But when there is only one customer – the government – there is a strong incentive for monopolistic behaviour to emerge. So, in doing away with public sector monopolies, which may have been inefficient, we have created private sector monopolies and oligopolies where the efficiency is no better but with the added kicker that taxpayer money is siphoned off into profits for the shareholders of these underperforming, unaccountable companies.  

Market-based reforms may set out to tackle real problems, but they often introduce as many as they solve. An unquestioning belief in the market’s ability to drive up quality and drive down price is as afactual and utopian as an unquestioning belief in the benevolence of government. Most importantly, Mazzucato is right that government is not a necessary evil to be boxed into as marginal a role as possible. There is a special, powerful, marshalling role that government can play in leading society-wide change, including in high-tech innovation, which will not happen if it retreats into the role of blind watchmaker.  

Without focused, market-shaping investment from government (what Mazzucato calls “mission thinking”), we would not have had the internet, COVID-19 vaccines, or – and this is the core example that frames Mazzucato’s analysis – the moon landing.  

Mazzucato has a convert, then, in this reformed McKinseyite. But I want to push her thinking even further.  

The debate about the role of the public sector, and public finance, is traditionally focused on the national sphere. That makes sense. Governments’ primary responsibility is to serve the needs of the people whom they govern, who fund their coffers, and who – in democracies at least – vote them in. But we know that there are a set of priorities that are truly global, that cannot be solved by any one government alone, and yet which governments have a responsibility to solve, because these problems concern their citizens too.  

Mazzucato tantalizingly touches on this set of issues by listing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (the only ever plan for humanity to be signed off by every single UN member state). But she does not venture into the question of what it would look like to marshal funding at a global level to tackle missions that are truly global in scope. 

What would global mission thinking look like? How could it be organized? 

That is precisely what we are working on at Global Nation, alongside a range offantastic partners. We call it Global Public Investment (which is also the subtitle of Jonathan Glennie’s latest book). 

Like all good ideas, Global Public Investment is in many ways, obvious. And yet it is radical, precisely because it is a challenge to the business-as-usual world that we know we need to change, but rarely have the bravery to reimagine. 

Mazzucato’s country-level “mission thinking” is bold, but it relies on a solid foundation. Over the last century we have created, in nation-states, extraordinary public institutions with the fiscal power that springs from everyone contributing through broad-based taxation, the legitimacy that springs from everyone having a vote, and the ambition that springs from a mandate to benefit everyone in society (whether that comes in the form of cash transfers for the poor or subsidized Opera for the lovers of soaring arias). In short: 

everyone contributes, everyone decides and everyone benefits. 

Such a system is well set up to take on transformative missions with fearless ambition. But when it comes to global missions, we only have the tired old system of “foreign aid” to grease the wheels.  

Foreign aid is precisely the opposite of what we need. The words “foreign” and “aid” both scream “someone else’s problem”. But climate change, pandemics, cyber security and a host of other issues are anything but someone else’s problem. They’re everyone’s problem. Foreign aid is a system for funding global cooperation where very few people contribute, very few people decide, and many, but not all, people benefit. For global mission thinking to take off – and to tackle issues like climate change it really must take off – we need a new paradigm. One in which, just like public finance at a country level, everyone contributes, everyone decides, and everyone benefits. Enter Global Public Investment. 

It may seem far-fetched for every country to contribute financially, but contributions that vary based on wealth are eminently possible. Consider that the even the poorest people contribute tax through VAT when they make purchases, even if they are net beneficiaries because their benefits are worth more than their taxes. In the same way, even the poorest countries can contribute something towards global goals, even as they remain net beneficiaries from international finance. If their contribution is tied to a real say in how the money is spent, the increase in agency, dignity and impact for poorer countries would more than compensate their contribution. 

It may seem far-fetched for everyone to decide. Why should the most powerful countries give up their privileges? But that same argument could have been used to explain why aristocracy could never give way to democracy. And it would be wrong again here. Wealthy countries know that they cannot alone shoulder the financial burden of fixing the world. That will become increasingly the case, as the costs stack up, and the proportion of the global economy that sits within middle-income countries rises. Unless rich countries share power, they know that they will never come up with the funds they need. 

And Global Public Investment offers something else to high income countries. Because this is a paradigm in which we acknowledge that no country is perfect. No country is “developed” (past tense). Every country is developing. And so in this move from foreign aid to Global Public Investment, impact can be felt by low, middle and high income countries alike. That is a promise that makes the sacrifice of more broadly shared power far more appealing. Of course, poorer countries like the “everyone benefits” model too. They are sick of being treated as the only people with challenges that need to be solved.  

Radical though it may sound, the prospects of transforming “foreign aid” into Global Public Investment have never been brighter. Many global initiatives have begun to embed at least part of this agenda in the way that they operate, such as the Global Fund, which has wide representation on its board, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which seeks to benefit rich and poor countries alike.  

And yet there is so much further to go. Mariana Mazzucato is already a supporter of Global Public Investment and spoke at a recent event marking the launch of a major report by the expert working group. But she could do far more to lead the thinking about how mission thinking could be realized at a global level (her work on European Union missions is already a promising starting point). 

The realities of power and geopolitics will always slow down and complexify the goal of building a global system truly capable of tackling our greatest challenges. But to rule out progress would be to ignore the incredible progress in state-building that allows mission thinking to deliver incredible results within national borders. It is the task of this century to build that system globally. And with billions of tons of additional carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere every year, there is no time to lose.