Emergent Power: Key Challenges and Capacities for Change Agents of a Second Renaissance - a new report

We are pleased to publish Emergent Power, a report on key challenges and capacities for change agents of a Second Renaissance.

This research study is part of Cohere+, an educational field-building project part-funded by the European Union. The Cohere+ project is a collaboration between: Life Itself; The Hague Center for Global Governance, Innovation and Emergence; the Institute for Integral Studies; Emerge; and the Ekskäret Foundation.

Below, you can:

• Read the Executive Summary of the report
• Read and download the full report

We value collective learning and collective sensemaking, and as such we very much welcome feedback and comments. Please feel free to join the conversation in the discussion forum or get in touch with us.

Executive Summary

In response to global crises, a growing number of individuals and organisations are questioning dominant systems, worldviews, and practices – and developing alternative ways of living and working. We refer to this as an “emerging ecosystem”: it still does not have a clear name or identity. Some of the terms with which this ecosystem might be associated include: “Metamodern”, “Polycrisis”, “Metacrisis”, “Regenerative”, “Great Turning”, “Integral”, “Holistic”, and “Second Renaissance”. In previous work, we have begun to identify some of its key characteristics. In particular, there seems to be a novel approach towards social change that is simultaneously “paradigmatic”, “integrated”, and “pragmatic”. [1]

A key question for our research is: what is needed to support this emerging ecosystem to become a system with real power and influence? We take as a starting point that this ecosystem contains and is developing knowledge and practices that can support collective responses to current socio-ecological crises. Specifically, this report seeks to understand: what inner capacities do change agents in the emerging ecosystem need to develop so that the ecosystem becomes more powerful and better able to contribute to life-serving socio-ecological transformation?

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 individuals working within the ecosystem. In this report, we synthesise insights from across the interviews.

We begin by asking what are the most important challenges that the ecosystem faces in becoming a system with enough influence to create attractive and viable alternatives to mainstream ways of living and working – in order to identify the ‘gaps’ where it makes sense to focus time and energy at present. The three key ecosystem-level challenges we articulate are:

1. Developing healthy relational cultures
2. Cultivating emergent ways of working together
3. Reckoning with dominant cultural paradigms

With these challenges in mind, we then identify six key “capacities for the future” that individuals and groups within the ecosystem should focus on developing:

1. Ease with uncertainty and complexity
2. Critical inquiry into existing mental structures
3. Addressing reactivity, tension, and conflict
4. Agency and capacity to implement vision
5. Acting in service of the greater whole
6. Collective inner resourcing

[1]: Theo Cox, Rufus Pollock, and Anna Schaffner, ‘Mapping for Emergence’, December 2021, Life Itself, https://lifeitself.org/blog/2021/12/09/mapping-for-emergence.

Full Report