The limits and opportunities of the EU Cities Mission: bridging literatures and learning from frontrunner cities in Sweden

Abstract The emergence of mission-oriented climate policy marks an important shift from traditional environmental governance towards transformative societal change. Yet while missions explicitly seek systemic transformation, the conceptual foundations informing many mission policies remain rooted in relatively narrow understandings of change. They often privilege innovation, experimentation, coordination, and measurable targets, while paying less attention to the political, institutional, relational, and contested dynamics that transformation scholars identify as central to urban change. Drawing on empirical evidence from Swedish frontrunner cities participating in the EU Cities Mission, this perspective argues that mission-oriented approaches would benefit from engaging more systematically with contemporary urban transformation research. While mission approaches emphasise strategic direction and policy coordination, transformation research highlights the importance of local practices, learning processes, and the socio-material conditions shaping implementation. By more systematically integrating these insights, mission-oriented approaches can enhance their sensitivity to context, improve their capacity to account for uncertainty and resistance, and support more adaptive and reflexive forms of governance. This, in turn, could increase the effectiveness of mission-oriented policies in translating ambitious goals into grounded and sustained transformation processes. Specifically, we outline several dimensions of transformation – including institutional and structural, power and politics, as well as relational and adaptive dimensions – that could be improved. We conclude that integrating these perspectives could strengthen both the analytical foundations and practical implementation of mission-oriented climate policy.