Mission’s Ecologies of Exclusion: a new Framework to analyse the exclusionary dynamics in Sustainability Missions

Abstract

This research examines how exclusionary dynamics emerge within Mission-Oriented Innovation Systems (MIS), despite Mission-Oriented Innovation Policy’s stated commitment to broad participation. To address this gap, the thesis develops the MIS Ecologies of Exclusion (MIS-EoE) framework, which adapts Chilvers et al.’s Ecologies of Participation by identifying antagonists, subjects, objects, and models of exclusion, and by distinguishing between institutional and socio-material constitutional structures. Integrated into Elzinga et al.’s MIS framework, MIS-EoE enables a systemic diagnosis of how exclusion is structurally embedded and functionally reproduced through normative, epistemic, substantive, and instrumental mechanisms.

The EU Soil Mission serves as a case study, using document analysis, event ethnography, and interviews. The problem–solution diagnosis reveals a depoliticised framing that highlights soil degradation yet avoids confronting industrial agriculture, creating a structural mismatch between problem and solution. The structural analysis shows how Horizon Europe, CAP exceptionalism, and agro-industrial entanglements form a constitutional setting that constrains participation and insulates decision-making. The functional analysis demonstrates how exclusion narrows knowledge, limits agency, and reduces participation to symbolic performance.

The study concludes that exclusion within the EU Soil Mission is not incidental but constitutive, preserving institutional coherence at the expense of transformative potential. For Industrial Ecology, the framework foregrounds how political and institutional dynamics shape transitions, expanding the field’s capacity to analyse justice, inclusion, and the governance conditions that underpin sustainable innovation.