'Collective Flourishing’ comprises two integrated parts: Collective – encompassing all life on Earth, now and in the future, taking a multi-species, more–than-human perspective, recognising the unique contributions of ‘the collective’ – an emergent property from the inherent complexity of the multitudes of interactions, interdependencies and inter-relationships between individual agents (both human and non-human) operating within highly connected dynamic systems. Flourishing – enabling life-forms and natural processes to occur, regenerate and endure – countering significant human induced threat and stress, from climate and nature breakdown, inequality, resource shortages, ill-health, pollution and conflict, achieving context-sensitive requirements and facilitating plural notions of ‘the good life’, comprising enduring ecological, social and economic wellbeing, resilience, equity and justice.
Moreover, ‘flourishing’ is a verb, not an adjective or a noun – it’s about fostering the necessary capabilities for sustainability and enabling generative and regenerative thinking and action. Flourishing is not as an inevitable end-point (or telos, as Aristotle put it), but is a continual unfolding of the good life that looks beyond simple short-term material gain and competitive advantage and requires a whole-systems approach to long-term value and wealth; fulfilling responsibility, exercising care, enhancing agency and adopting alternative perspectives such as ‘ubuntu’: “I am because we are”.
We might recognise ‘collective flourishing’ as a clear statement of ambition from international efforts to achieve and go beyond the UN 2030 Agenda, to give shape and substance to the 2024 UN Pact for the Future and the Declaration on Future Generations (UN, 2024). Commitment and investment in building collective flourishing is a tangible way to ‘enact the pact’.
