The Convergent Landscape

A Convergent Landscape: Mapping the Movement to Realign Modern Societies with Human Flourishing

A working document from the Convergent Society project

Introduction

This page surveys the major projects working toward the realignment of modern societies with human flourishing, identifies the bridges between them, and locates the Convergent Society project within the broader landscape. It is offered in the spirit of a participant, not a critic.

The map is a living document. It will grow and be corrected as the project deepens its engagement with each of the organizations and thinkers named here. Feedback, suggestions, and additions are genuinely welcome.

Foreword

Something is happening across the intellectual landscape that may not be visible from inside any one field.

In political economy, a serious post-neoliberal vocabulary is forming. In ecological thought, a generation of thinkers has moved beyond critique to architecture. In philosophy and ethics, the capability approach has matured into a global framework for human flourishing. In democratic theory, the question is no longer whether liberal democracy is in crisis but what kind of institutional reconstruction the moment requires. In civic life, organizations once focused on single issues are increasingly asking systemic questions.

These efforts have proceeded largely in parallel. Their participants read each other unevenly, attend different conferences, publish in different journals, and address different audiences. The result is a landscape rich in insight but fragmented in conversation. Each project sees a portion of the problem clearly and builds an answer suited to its angle of vision. None alone is sufficient. Together they begin to suggest the shape of something larger.

This document is an attempt to make that landscape legible. It surveys the major projects working toward the realignment of modern societies with human flourishing, describes each on its own terms, and identifies the bridges where collaboration would deepen the collective effort.

The Convergent Society project, which has produced this document, sits within that landscape as one contribution among many. Its specific focus is the structural and civic dimensions of the misalignment, and how they connect across economic, political, ecological, and epistemic domains. It does not claim to integrate the field. It claims only that the integration is worth pursuing, and that the work goes better when those doing it know one another.

I. The Shared Moment

Across the projects mapped here, a common diagnosis has emerged, even where the vocabulary differs.

Modern societies have built systems of extraordinary capability — economic, technological, administrative — that have progressively detached from the human and ecological purposes they were meant to serve. The result is a paradox visible in the data and felt in everyday life: societies that succeed by their own metrics while failing the people living inside them. Trust collapses. Belonging weakens. Democratic confidence erodes. Ecological systems strain past their limits. Material progress continues alongside a pervasive sense that something essential has gone wrong.

The diagnosis is no longer marginal. Joseph Stiglitz, writing for the Roosevelt Institute, identifies neoliberalism as a political agenda that fostered "despair and alienation, polarization, short life expectancies, and environmental degradation." Mariana Mazzucato calls for governments to "recover a sense of public purpose." Jeremy Lent argues that the crises we face cannot be solved domain by domain and require a coherent redesign of the world system as a whole. Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics challenges the goal of growth itself, asking instead what it would mean for humanity to thrive within social foundations and planetary boundaries. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have documented how democracies erode from within. The Niskanen Center argues that the failure of governance is what got us into this mess.

These voices come from different traditions and pursue different projects. What they share is the conviction that the present condition is not a coincidence of policy failures but the manifestation of a deeper structural pattern, and that responding to it requires more than reform within existing frameworks.

This is the shared moment. The map that follows surveys how it is being addressed.

II. The Major Projects

The landscape can be organized into five clusters, each with a distinct emphasis and contribution.

Cluster One: Ecological Civilization

This cluster begins from the recognition that the relationship between human societies and the natural world is the deepest layer of the present crisis. Its projects treat ecology not as one issue among many but as the foundational frame within which all other questions must be addressed.

The Ecocivilization Coalition, led by Jeremy Lent and the Institute for Ecological Civilization, is the most ambitious recent attempt to organize this work into a coherent movement. Lent's framework draws on systems thinking and traces our current crisis to an extractive worldview that treats the living world as a resource to be exploited. His new book, Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All, moves across economics, finance, technology, governance, agriculture, law, urban design, and education. The Coalition explicitly conceives of itself as a "transformation catalyst" — an alliance of changemakers building what Lent calls islands of coherence that can lift the entire system toward a different stable state. Lent also founded the Deep Transformation Network, a global community of over five thousand members.

The Schumacher Center for a New Economics carries forward E. F. Schumacher's vision of human-scale, place-based economic life. Its work emphasizes local economies, community land trusts, and the practical infrastructure of economic regeneration. Its annual Schumacher Lectures have served as a meeting point for thinkers across the regenerative tradition since 1980.

The Doughnut Economics Action Lab, founded by Kate Raworth, has built one of the most visually and conceptually powerful frameworks of the past decade. The Doughnut — the space between social foundations and planetary boundaries — gives policymakers and citizens a way to ask the right question: how do we meet the needs of all within the means of the planet? DEAL works with cities (Amsterdam being the most prominent), businesses, and educators worldwide to translate the framework into practice.

The Wellbeing Economy Alliance, founded in 2018, is a global network of over five hundred organizations working to transform economic systems to prioritize social and ecological wellbeing over financial growth. WEAll connects to the Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership, which now includes Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, Finland, and Iceland — countries piloting alternatives to GDP-centric governance.

Capital Institute and the Center for Economic Democracy extend this work into finance and community ownership. The Next System Project, co-chaired by Gar Alperovitz, and the Democracy Collaborative ask the structural question directly: what comes after the present system, and how is it built?

Cluster Two: Post-Neoliberal Economics

This cluster has emerged most visibly over the past decade and now constitutes the most active intellectual conversation in mainstream policy circles. Its participants share the conviction that the neoliberal consensus has failed and that a new economic paradigm is required.

The Roosevelt Institute, with Joseph Stiglitz as Chief Economist and Felicia Wong having led the organization's expansion, has done much of the heavy lifting to articulate what comes next. Its publications — including The Emerging Worldview, Sea Change, and Stiglitz's work on rewriting the rules — have become foundational texts of the post-neoliberal moment. Roosevelt's work moves fluidly between theory and policy, connecting academic thinking to legislative possibility.

Civic Ventures and the Pitchfork Economics podcast, founded by Nick Hanauer, have made the case for middle-out economics with unusual reach. Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker's forthcoming Market Humanism argues that markets should be redesigned around human flourishing rather than shareholder returns. Their work draws on complexity science, behavioral economics, and evolutionary thinking, and has been particularly effective at reaching political and business audiences.

The Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London, founded by Mariana Mazzucato, has rebuilt the case for the entrepreneurial state. Mazzucato's mission-oriented framework treats public investment as a creative force rather than a corrective to market failure, and her advisory role with governments from Italy to Scotland to South Africa has translated the framework into actual policy.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking, founded in 2009 and now with branches at Oxford and Cambridge, supports heterodox economic research and trains the next generation of economists through its Young Scholars Initiative. INET Oxford, where Eric Beinhocker has long worked, has been particularly important for complexity economics and the systems approach.

The American Economic Liberties Project and the Open Markets Institute have rebuilt the case against concentrated corporate power, treating monopoly as a political problem rather than a pricing one — a tradition rooted in Louis Brandeis and revived for the digital age.

Cluster Three: Democratic Theory and Institutional Renovation

This cluster takes democratic erosion as its central concern and asks how political institutions can be redesigned to restore legitimacy and capacity.

The Berggruen Institute, founded by Nicolas Berggruen, runs the Renovating Democracy program alongside its work on philosophy, planetary governance, and AI. Its co-publication of Noema Magazine has become an important platform for serious political thought, and its book Renovating Democracy makes the case for citizen assemblies and new mediating institutions that complement representative government.

The Niskanen Center, founded in 2015, has positioned itself as one of the most interesting moderate think tanks in American politics. Its founding insight — that the failure of governance is what produced today's populism, and that effective governance is what will heal it — sits very close to the structural argument the Convergent Society makes. Niskanen rejects both market fundamentalism and democratic fundamentalism, arguing that markets and democracy are co-dependent and both require active institutional cultivation.

The SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, Protect Democracy, and the Renew Democracy Initiative focus more directly on the immediate threats to democratic norms. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's work at Harvard, including the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, has been central to the academic understanding of competitive authoritarianism and democratic backsliding.

The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, Freedom House, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace provide the empirical infrastructure for tracking democratic health globally.

Cluster Four: Philosophical and Humanist Foundations

This cluster works at the slower pace of foundational thinking, asking what a society organized around human flourishing actually requires.

The capability approach, developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, has become the most influential philosophical alternative to utility-based accounts of welfare. The Human Development and Capability Association brings together hundreds of scholars across nearly fifty nations. The UN's Human Development Reports, which the approach helped inspire, have shaped global development thinking since 1990.

The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, Princeton's University Center for Human Values, and the Hoover Institution's civic thought program approach the questions through the lens of ethics, virtue, and the conditions of a good life.

The Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Center sits at the intersection of philosophy and policy, awarding the annual Berggruen Philosophy Prize and convening cross-cultural conversations on democracy, technology, and the human condition.

Cluster Five: Civic Renewal and the Public Realm

This cluster focuses on the social and civic infrastructure that sustains shared life — the layer that all the other projects depend on but that is often treated as background rather than foreground.

The Aspen Institute, particularly its Citizenship and American Identity Program, and More in Common — with its research on the exhausted majority — have reshaped understanding of where citizens actually stand and what brings them together.

Robert Putnam's ongoing work, the SNF Agora Institute, and the Civic Health Project track the empirical erosion of civic life and the strategies for rebuilding it. The Asset-Based Community Development Institute, founded by John McKnight, offers practical methodologies for community-level renewal.

Public media organizations, public libraries, and civic technology projects belong here as well — the institutions that maintain the shared informational and relational commons.

III. The Bridges That Already Exist

What is striking in this landscape is how much the bridges are already there, even when the projects do not name them.

The Ecocivilization framework names extraction as the underlying dynamic. The post-neoliberal economics cluster names financialization as the same dynamic in another domain. The democratic theory cluster names capture as how that dynamic locks itself in. These are descriptions of one process operating across different terrains.

Doughnut Economics names planetary boundaries above and social foundations below. The capability approach gives the philosophical content of what those social foundations require. The Wellbeing Economy Alliance translates both into measurable governance. These are layers of the same architecture.

Mazzucato's entrepreneurial state and Niskanen's argument for state capacity converge from different ideological starting points on the same conclusion: that democratic societies require institutions capable of pursuing shared purposes, and that the dismantling of such institutions has been the central error of recent decades.

The Roosevelt Institute's emphasis on rewriting the rules and the Berggruen Institute's emphasis on renovating democracy address the same structural question — how concentrated power has captured rule-making — from the economic and political sides respectively.

Lent's emphasis on civilizational worldview and the capability approach's emphasis on philosophical foundations both insist that the deeper question is not what we should do but what kind of beings, in what kind of world, we are trying to become.

The bridges, in other words, are not theoretical projections. They are descriptions of how these projects already overlap, even where their participants have not yet had the conversation that would make the overlap explicit.

IV. Where the Convergent Society Project Sits

The Convergent Society project, developed in Humanism and the Good Society and the working paper Structural Divergence and the Crisis of Institutional Alignment in Advanced Democracies, occupies a specific position in this landscape.

Its central contribution is structural and cross-domain. It argues that the deteriorations documented separately by each cluster — economic decoupling, ecological overshoot, democratic erosion, civic fragmentation, epistemic collapse — are best understood as manifestations of a single underlying condition. It names that condition Structural Divergence: a phase in which powerful subsystems optimize their internal logics with increasing efficiency while the integrative mechanisms oriented toward human flourishing progressively weaken. It identifies the institutional mechanism as structural incoherence — the breakdown of alignment among the governing logics of economic, political, social, and epistemic subsystems — and traces its generation through the compounding processes of drift and capture.

The project also offers a comparative empirical anchor in the Nordic and Swiss exceptions, which demonstrate that coherence under modern complexity is achievable through deliberate institutional architecture, not cultural inheritance.

The Convergent Society framework is not a substitute for any of the projects mapped above. Each of them does work that the framework rests upon. What the framework attempts is the integration — the connecting tissue that allows these projects to be understood as contributing to a single architectural challenge rather than as parallel reform agendas in adjacent domains.

In that sense the project is best positioned as a connector. Its natural collaborators are not those whose territory it claims but those whose territory it helps make legible to one another.

V. An Invitation

This document is offered as a starting point, not a finished map. It will inevitably miss projects that deserve inclusion, misrepresent some of the ones it includes, and underestimate connections that are already further along than visible from outside.

What it tries to do is something modest. To make the landscape legible. To name the bridges already there. To suggest that the work each project is doing belongs to a larger architectural effort whose coherence is not yet fully visible to itself.

The Convergent Society project would welcome conversation with any of the organizations and thinkers named here — and many not named — about how this landscape can be better understood, more deliberately connected, and more effectively built.

Convergence does not emerge from awareness alone. It has to be designed, built, and sustained. The good news is that the materials are already in the room. The harder work is recognizing that we are building the same structure.