Mission Barbados: The story so far
By Mariana Mazzucato, Sarah Doyle, Bridget Gildea, and Luca Kuehn von Burgsdorff
“You need six months to break the habit, one year to build a new habit, and seven years for transformation.” In February 2023, Prime Minister Mia Mottley set out the need for a new economic and social transformation strategy in Barbados. Six months to deconstruct, one year to reconstruct, and seven years to transform.
The reality is slightly messier, of course, but these three stages broadly match on to the work the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) has been doing with the Government of Barbados over the past two and a half years. First, establish a new direction for the country. Second, reconsider the way government was organised to change course. Third, implement that new direction.
Why Mission Barbados?
In the 2023 Budget Speech, Prime Minister Mottley set out the government’s plans for a long-term national strategy. “This Budget is about national transformation, about building a global society and a world-class people by 2030. […] It will be a national exercise involving every man, woman, and child who wants to step up to the plate.” This national strategy became known as Mission Barbados.
This ambition is reflected in Prime Minister Mottley’s global leadership in advocating for financial reform to support climate resilience. The Bridgetown Initiative, which the Prime Minister invited Professor Mariana Mazzucato to be a founding member of in July 2022, is at the heart of this effort. The initiative aims to reform the international financial system to provide low and middle-income vulnerable countries with more fiscal space for climate adaptation efforts.
Take the country’s recent debt-for-climate swap as an example. In 2024, Barbados leveraged a debt-for-climate swap to enhance domestic water resilience, repurposing $592.7 million in domestic debt into a low-interest loan. This initiative redirected $220 million in savings over ten years to fund the South Coast Water Reclamation Project, which aims to improve water management, agricultural irrigation, and aquifer recharge, strengthening the island’s climate adaptation efforts.
The purpose of the Bridgetown Initiative is not just to change the global debate, but precisely to empower governments to drive domestic economic transformation. It is in this context that Prime Minister Mottley and Professor Mariana Mazzucato launched a partnership between the Government of Barbados and UCL IIPP in February 2023.
Six missions to transform Barbados into a sustainable, inclusive, and resilient society
The first phase of IIPP’s collaboration with the Government of Barbados, which ran from January to October 2023, focused on defining a set of national missions — bold, long-term, and timebound societal objectives — to guide the country along a new development pathway that puts inclusive and sustainable growth front and center. The IIPP team was comprised of Professor Mazzucato and her policy advisors, Sarah Doyle and Luca Kuehn von Burgsdorff, who worked closely with Prime Minister Mottley and her office to advise on this new policy approach. The process involved roundtables, workshops, and direct consultations with policymakers, civil servants, businesses, and trade unions to understand the main challenges and opportunities facing the country.
The Social Partnership — a coalition of government, labor, and business leaders — was crucial in the process of defining the missions. Developed in the mid-1990s following a financial crisis, the Social Partnership model creates a forum for government, labor, and business leaders to come together to identify and work towards shared goals and build trust. As Owen Arthur, Barbados’ Prime Minister from 1994 to 2008 underscored, “without trust there can be no thrust.”
In May 2023, the Government of Barbados and the Social Partnership signed the Declaration of Mission Barbados, formalizing six national missions aimed at addressing six key challenges: “an unhealthy planet in crisis”; “a constantly changing value system, which threatens social cohesion”; “food and water insecurity”; “deteriorating physical and mental health and pockets of social instability”; “development deficit that has spawned financial marginalization and worker vulnerability”; and “inequitable digital access and slow technological conversion”.
This first phase culminated in the publication of A Mission-Oriented Strategy for Inclusive and Sustainable Economic Growth in Barbados, authored by Professor Mazzucato. The report outlined key priorities and implementation pathways for the six national missions, providing a roadmap for action. The findings were presented by Professor Mazzucato to the Prime Minister and her Cabinet, as well as at the Sir Winston Scott Memorial Lecture in November 2023.
An integrated approach to policy design, implementation, and learning
Following the definition of the missions, the second phase of work (June–November 2024) focused on building the institutional and public sector capacities necessary for implementation, based on a co-learning process developed by IIPP and the Government of Barbados, which began during the previous phase. Led by Professor Mazzucato together with Bridget Gildea (Applied Learning Lead, IIPP), this co-design process drew on an understanding of the challenges and opportunities involved in the early stages of implementing Barbados’ missions. IIPP worked closely with colleagues across the Government of Barbados, including the nascent Missions Control Centre, Learning and Development Directorate, and National Training Initiative. Together, they designed the learning programme in an applied way, co-building solutions with participants and thereby integrating learning into the implementation phase of the work.
A key component of this phase was a hybrid training initiative designed for 60 senior civil service leaders, including Permanent Secretaries and Director Generals, delivered by IIPP faculty members such as Professors Mazzucato, Rainer Kattel, David Eaves, Mike Bracken, and Dan Hill. Running over a period of six months virtually, with core ‘applied’ learning loops where participants applied the learning of the previous programme session into their work and roles each week, the programme introduced and explored with the programme participants strategic policy approaches to mission implementation, digital governance, and innovative public procurement.
The programme was also an opportunity for us to learn more together with Barbados’ civil service leaders about the bottlenecks they face in adopting a more outcomes-oriented approach to policy design, implementation and governance. We dug into the specific topography of challenges identified by participants, such as “fragmented and siloed coordination in government”, “insufficient mission-aligned policy tools and institutions”, and “the need for robust monitoring and evaluation to support learning, transparency, and accountability.” This joint learning process helped us identify pressure points in the system and enabled our government partners to consider how best to adapt their toolkit to address specific challenges during the implementation phase. It also helped build a robust sense of shared endeavour between IIPP and the participants.
The second phase concluded in November 2024 with an intensive, week-long in-person program in Bridgetown, where participants engaged in hands-on exercises and discussions on public sector reform and
digital transformation.
Realising the transformative potential of Mission Barbados
The Government of Barbados is now advancing the implementation of the missions. This stage involves setting up new institutional structures (including a Mission Control Center and Mission Boards), mapping the government’s existing projects and programmes, and redesigning key policy tools — like public budgeting and procurement — to become mission aligned. The applied learning approach will continue to help advance the work in an agile way, based on challenges being identified in real time during implementation.
To support this effort, Luca Kuehn von Burgsdorff, Senior Policy Advisor to Professor Mazzucato, is now based in the Mission Control Center in Barbados to support the government. This secondment-type model represents a new approach for UCL IIPP in its work with government partners.
Over the next weeks, as we document the ongoing work of Mission Barbados, it will become clear that it takes much longer than six months to break the habit and one year to build a new habit. However, if the Government of Barbados gets it right, then it can reap the fruits of transformation for much longer than seven years and provide — in the words of Prime Minister Mottley — “a blueprint that can inspire nations to adopt a mission-oriented strategy”.
