In our work at the Innovation in Politics Institute, we have seen how local governments across Europe are stepping into a new leadership role with growing confidence. Increasingly, they act as conveners, creating spaces for mission-driven alliances that bridge government, business, academia, and civil society. These alliances align capacities and act where challenges demand not just institutional reforms, but shared ownership of problems and shared responsibility for action. Many European cities and regional governments have become laboratories of the future, pioneering practical solutions to transformational challenges.
For this report, we set out to explore one central question: Which transformational tasks are so complex that no single actor can solve them alone – and how are cities and regional governments building the partnerships to meet them? These are the kinds of missions that force governments, businesses, civic actors, and academia to work together – because otherwise, they would not succeed.
Creating new ways of working together
Over the past seven years, we have scouted more than 2,000 best practices and evaluated them with the help of over 15,000 citizen jurors. This has taught us something important: governments perform best when they work in genuine partnership with other sectors. If we understand the emerging fields where this collaboration is taking place, we can also better understand why some partnerships succeed more than others.
Success is not a matter of issuing top-down decrees and hoping for compliance. In Linz, for example, the city and the government of Upper Austria invited construction firms, utilities, banks, and NGOs to co-design the shift to a circular economy in the building sector – turning a regulatory challenge into a collaborative mission. In Cascais, years of working closely with NGOs and the private sector meant that when refugee integration became urgent, partners responded immediately because trust had already been built. Bologna’s climate neutrality mission and “Data Valley” transition, Burgos’ circular industrial estate, and Warsaw’s climate city contract all show the same pattern: solutions to complex problems emerge when diverse actors co-own the process from the start.
Research on intersectoral governance confirms what these cities demonstrate in practice: effective cross-sector collaboration requires careful navigation of power dynamics, shared frameworks, clear accountability, and above all, the willingness to learn and adapt together. It is not only about aligning interests; it is also about creating new ways of working that value the strengths each sector brings. Along the way, partners often discover more common ground than they expected, and the trust built can be as valuable as the policy outcomes themselves.
Insights from 20 European cities
The cities and regional governments in this report – about 20 across Europe – are not advancing through grand declarations, but through persistent, practical collaboration. We call these emerging forms of cooperation “Mission Partnerships”: alliances anchored in shared goals, trust-based processes, and mutual accountability. Each looks different, shaped by its local context, but the lesson is clear: the more governments collaborate with businesses and civil society, the better they perform, the more resilient their solutions, and the more trust they earn from citizens.
This analysis does not offer a one-size-fits-all formula. It offers observations, principles, and stories from the frontlines of systemic change.
We hope this Report not only provides inspiring examples, but is also seen as an invitation to those who understand leadership as the ability to convene. It should give you know-how and reassurance that some challenges are simply too complex to be tackled alone – and that there is a proven way to meet them.