Breaking down societal challenges: an exploration of relations between problems and solutions in mission-oriented policies

Mission-oriented policies aim to address societal challenges by catalysing innovation and sectoral policies towards defined goals. However, literature remains vague on the structures within societal challenges and how they can be broken down into manageable issues. We argue that especially the hierarchical dimension of problems and solutions remains understudied, creating difficulties to analyse the directionality of missions. Based on the concept of the problem–solution space, we propose a novel analytical framework, the ‘mission firmament’, as an attempt to map the complex relationships between problems and solutions in the context of societal challenges. It contains hierarchies of debated issues, shows how societal views converge or diverge on certain aspects, considers temporality of debates, and emphasizes potential leverage points for missions to maximize their contributions to solving societal challenges. We illustrate our framework with the case of the national strategy for circular economy in Germany.