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Short abstract:

What kinds of omnipotent fantasies of governance and control do mission discourses bring to the management of technoscientific innovation? What happens to democratic politics in the name of complete transformation? And what is transformed in the process?

Long abstract:

By critically exploring the emergence of mission-oriented innovation imaginaries, I would like to discuss how talk and practice around missions by policymakers involves a powerful shift in focus in technoscientific governance from responsibility as individual moral decision-making to missions as the undeniable trajectory that technoscience must take to meet plantery-scale challenges such as climate change. Through the discourse of missions – including all of the connotations connecting missions to white Christian saviourism and the military – Europe’s position as an “innovation leader” through large-scale infrastructural projects, is justified. In the process, local politics with its conflicts and ambiguities evaporates are replaced with omnipotent visions of the greater good. Mission-oriented innovation threatens to obscure the subjective and tacit conditions and processes that bring about collective decisions through an idealised “common good”.

Through the study of policy documents, interviews with policymakers, and grey literature on mission-oriented innovation, I will explore how the totalising fantasies of missions are produced via forms of speech and legitimation, tacit value decisions about the common good, the articulation of challenges, questions, and conflicts. I argue that by positioning the science and innovation projects as sites in which political decisions in the name of a common and collective good are taken, these projects become sites of decentralized politics.