Capability agenda
Generated 2026-10-03
The frame includes 125 countries. Each dimension is scored from 0 to 100, with no overall ranking, and each score shows its confidence beside it. Read the known limits of the data before you quote a score.
Open the profile: indicators, values, years and sources
| Dimension | Score | Confidence | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anticipation | 62.2 | 0.46 | +0.3 over 10 years using 2 indicators |
| Agency | 65.0 | 0.56 | no trend |
| Coordination | 93.5 | 0.39 | no trend |
| Trust | 69.8 | 0.50 | no trend |
| Learning | 69.5 | 0.55 | no trend |
| Experimentation | 74.7 | 0.33 | +2.6 over 10 years using 3 indicators |
| Adaptability | 72.0 | 0.62 | no trend |
| Building | 61.9 | 0.57 | -3.3 over 10 years using 3 indicators |
| Shared Purpose | 52.9 | 0.42 | -0.4 over 10 years using 2 indicators |
Score
Confidence
The score rests on one or two indicators. Do not quote it on its own.
A minority of indicators, or evidence old enough to have moved. Read with care.
Enough evidence to compare countries, with known holes.
Most indicators observed, recent, from official or intergovernmental sources.
Select a dimension to see how France’s comparable evidence has moved over time. The vertical scale is the current comparison frame, from 0 to 100.
Dimension
Period
Shared Purpose 1976 → 2026: 59.3 to 70.5 (+11.2) over 50 years using 2 indicators
Historical values use today’s frame from 0 to 100 and a matched basket of indicators. They show movement in the available evidence, not an overall development score. Dated agenda items appear on a separate timeline and do not change the score. A missing line means the evidence does not support a comparable trend for that dimension.
The evidence is too thin to manage these dimensions confidently.
How easily can new approaches be attempted, tested, abandoned, and improved?
Uses 4 observed indicators.
Missing indicators: Venture deals, Firms through regulatory sandboxes, University spinouts.
Rejected datasets: Business share of R&D.
How effectively can independent actors organize around shared objectives?
Uses 3 observed indicators.
Missing indicators: University-industry collaboration, Public-private collaboration.
Rejected datasets: Government effectiveness, Regulatory quality, Logistics performance.
To what extent can people imagine themselves as participants in a common project?
Uses 3 observed indicators.
Missing indicators: Sense of national belonging, Volunteering, Political polarisation.
Rejected datasets: Voice and accountability.
These dimensions score at least 50 with usable evidence.
| Dimension | Score | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| Adaptability | 72.0 | 0.62 |
| Trust | 69.8 | 0.50 |
| Learning | 69.5 | 0.55 |
| Agency | 65.0 | 0.56 |
| Anticipation | 62.2 | 0.46 |
| Building | 61.9 | 0.57 |
18 requested indicators have no comparable dataset, and each one lowers confidence. A gap can become an indicator when a comparable series covers at least two countries.
| Dimension | Missing indicator | What it asks |
|---|---|---|
| Anticipation | Government foresight capacity | Existence, mandate and continuity of a national strategic foresight function. |
| Anticipation | Long-horizon research commitments | New competitively awarded public research grants that run for five years or longer, as a share of all new competitive public research grants awarded in the year. |
| Agency | Adults doing digital tasks | Share of adults who carried out a named digital task in the last three months, such as sending a message with an attached file, moving a file between devices or using a spreadsheet formula, counted one task at a time and never as a skill level. |
| Coordination | University-industry collaboration | Intensity of research collaboration between universities and firms. |
| Coordination | Public-private collaboration | Frequency and scale of joint public-private delivery of national objectives. |
| Trust | Trust in public institutions | Confidence in national government, courts and civil service. |
| Trust | Court case clearance rate | Civil and commercial cases resolved in a year as a share of cases filed in the same year. |
| Learning | Adult learning participation | Share of adults in formal or non-formal education and training in the last 12 months. |
| Experimentation | Venture deals | First venture capital rounds closed by companies based in the country in the year, per million people, counted by deal and never by amount. |
| Experimentation | Firms through regulatory sandboxes | Firms admitted to, and firms completing, a regulatory sandbox or controlled trial regime in the year, per million people, summed across every regulator in the country. |
| Experimentation | University spinouts | Companies formed to commercialise university research, per million people. |
| Adaptability | Disaster preparedness and recovery | Demonstrated capacity to prepare for and recover from major shocks. |
| Adaptability | Institutional responsiveness | Speed at which rules and public programmes are changed in response to new conditions. |
| Building | Large project delivery | Cost and schedule performance of major public infrastructure projects. |
| Building | Firm scale-up rate | Share of young firms reaching significant employment or turnover thresholds. |
| Shared Purpose | Sense of national belonging | Reported identification with and attachment to the national community, as distinct from pride in the nation. |
| Shared Purpose | Volunteering | Share of adults who volunteered time to an organisation in the last month. |
| Shared Purpose | Political polarisation | Degree to which political differences run along a single hostile divide. |
Documented deliveries linked to missing indicators. They do not affect scores or confidence.
France's Flamanville 3 EPR took about 16.5 years from construction beginning in September 2007 to completion in early 2024, and its commissioning was the country's first new nuclear reactor since Civaux 2 in 1999, a 25-year gap.
France's Compte personnel de formation generated 1,387,500 training starts in 2024, with 1,232,100 people entering a CPF-funded course through the national account and platform.
France's national statistics office Insee reported that people unemployed for at least one year represented 23.3% of all unemployed people in 2024, while the long-term unemployment rate was 1.7% of the active population, down from 3.1% in 2015.
France's health ministry and its stockpile agency built a strategic pandemic stock of about 1.7 billion FFP2 and surgical masks by 2009, but by the start of the covid-19 crisis it held only about 100 million valid masks, according to the Senate commission of inquiry.
The Société du Grand Paris, the state's public builder, renamed Société des grands projets by the law of 27 December 2023, has been building the Grand Paris Express automatic metro since works began in June 2016. The project's estimated total cost rose from 22.6 billion euros in March 2013 to 36.1 billion euros from October 2021, about 60 percent above the 2013 estimate.
Under the Plan France Très Haut Débit, defined by the government in February 2013, private operators and local-authority public initiative networks built fibre so that 43.1 million of France's 45.2 million premises, 95.3 percent, were connectable to fibre at the end of June 2026.
France's research ministry has funded Cifre industrial doctorates since 1981, paying an employer 42,000 euros over three years to hire a doctoral candidate whose thesis research is run in partnership with an academic laboratory; ANRT, which operates the scheme for the ministry, accepted 1,700 new Cifre in 2025 across 1,029 distinct employers.
The Bureau of the French Senate created a foresight delegation in April 2009, succeeding the planning delegation set up by the 1982 planning reform law, with a mandate to study changes in society and the economy and to build scenarios; it has 36 senators appointed in proportion to the political groups and adopted reports in every year from 2010 to 2022 listed on its page.
Under the 2019 energy and climate law, France's energy regulator CRE and the energy directorate DGEC granted temporary derogations from network access rules to 30 projects, 25 by CRE and 5 by DGEC, of which six were running and reporting indicators in May 2025 and two had been generalised into regulation in 2024.
France scaled its short-time work scheme (activité partielle) from an industrial instrument into an economy-wide one in the spring of 2020, placing 8.4 million employees on it at the April 2020 peak and 11.3 million at some point between March 2020 and December 2021.
Fill a gap, file evidence or challenge an indicator at github.com/envisioning/national-capability-benchmark. The docs explain the method and decisions.