“Curae ergo sum – we care, therefore we are” (Raul Lejano)

Nurturing connectedness and repairing relationships in the 21st century

This week we will be launching publicly Pro(to)topia, a think and do network dedicated to imagineering caring futures by organising an online event on the triple crisis of care.  We want to take this opportunity to share our gratitude with all the kindred spirits which have supported us on this adventure so far: our board, our associates and our many partners and friends around the world including the Global Alliance for Care, the Forum for Caring societies, WEALL, Hot or Cool, Avina and Partners 4 the New Economy.

We hope this event help build a prototype of a different society, not born out of dystopia, not promising a distant utopia, but charting a concrete path of change, which will be judged through policy, practice, investment, governance, institutional and cultural changes at the local, regional and global level. 

This is why this inaugural event will be followed by a series of ideation labs focusing on concrete issues such as caring digital futures, caring energy systems, caring territories and caring prosperity.

The triple crisis of care as a crisis of connectedness and relationality

The current crisis of connectedness and relationality is rooted in an economic and social order that has spent decades defining humans as fundamentally egocentric, competitive atoms, and then designing institutions, markets and narratives to match that fiction. Together, these dynamics, which place efficiency, instant gratification and productivity as their ultimate goal,  erode our capacity and our opportunities to be present to ourselves, to others and to the living world, leaving people materially surrounded yet emotionally and socially undernourished.

Connection to self

The explosion of lifestyle‑related Non communicableDiseases worldwide suggest lives in which people are cut off from bodily signals (exhaustion, stress, pain), from their own needs for rest, movement, and nourishing food, and from the time and inner space required to notice and respond to those needs. Instead, bodies are pushed to conform to productivity norms, convenience logics, and marketed habits that override self‑awareness and self‑care. The scale of the global mental‑health burden similarly reflects a widespread erosion of inner grounding: people struggle to feel at home in themselves, to make meaning of their lives, and to process emotions in conditions of chronic stress, insecurity, and social fragmentation.  Seen this way, the dominant causes of mortality and disability are not only biomedical “risk factors” but symptoms of societies that chronically estrange people from their own bodies, feelings, limits and desires, making it difficult to live in tune with oneself and to act from that connection in everyday choices. This is the direct result of a broader patriarchal imaginary that refuses limits, despises vulnerability and fears dependence, aging, illness and care—the very experiences that reveal our interdependence with others and with the living world.

Connection to others

While the demand for childcare, eldercare, health and mental‑health support explodes, the very systems that should mediate our interdependence are starved of resources and staff. Caring behaviours remain structurally undervalued because they have been historically feminised and essentialised: care is treated as a “natural” attribute of women rather than a shared civic responsibility, which justifies paying it poorly, outsourcing it to racialised and migrant women, or not paying it at all. People who need care are left alone with complex needs; people who provide care (mostly women and low‑paid workers) are exhausted and isolated, with little time or support to sustain meaningful relationships beyond survival. The current care crisis is not only a failure of service delivery but a sign that entire communities have been stripped of the time, spaces and infrastructures needed to recognise each other’s suffering and respond together.

The same logic that devalues “women’s work” devalues all forms of maintenance and repair of life, whether human or more‑than‑human. Digital technologies and social media deepen this crisis of connection: many interactions are displaced onto platforms optimised for attention and data extraction rather than mutual presence, producing forms of hyper‑connection that coexist with intense loneliness. Online, people may be constantly visible but rarely truly seen, as algorithms feed outrage and comparison while face‑to‑face, slow, embodied forms of being‑with (neighbourliness, communal rituals, collective organising) erode. At the same time, work and public services become ever more mediated by screens, apps and automated systems, reducing opportunities for informal care—small gestures of help, listening and solidarity—that normally weave social fabric and that ecofeminist thought recognises as the invisible foundation of any liveable society.

Connection to the living world

Our crisis is not only one of emissions or biodiversity loss; it is a crisis of connection with the living world. Instead of experiencing ourselves as part of a more‑than‑human community, we relate to other beings and ecosystems primarily as resources to be extracted, optimised or owned. This utilitarian stance underpins patterns of overconsumption and industrial production that destabilise the climate, drive a mass extinction of species, and contaminate the air, water and soils that sustain all life. This disconnection is reinforced by how and where we live. In North America and Northern Europe, people now spend around 90% of their time indoors, with about 87% in enclosed buildings and another 5–6% in vehicles. By mid‑life, this means that many of us have literally spent decades surrounded by artificial environments rather than forests, soils, rivers or night skies. The more our daily routines unfold inside climate‑controlled, screen‑mediated spaces, the harder it becomes to perceive our dependence on living systems—or to feel responsibility and care for them.

Reconnecting and repairing relationships as a policy goal

Given this backdrop of a triple crisis of care, institutions and practices must be evaluated and designed in terms of how they foster or erode relationships (trust, recognition, mutual concern), not in terms of so-called efficiency. Policy frameworks must conceive the crises of connection to self, to others and to the living world as fundamentally indivisible and interconnected. They must therefore pass a very simple litmus test of contributing to repairing relationships with self, others and the living world, when and where they are broken.

In our event, we will hear of concrete projects meant to help us repair relationships. 

UNDP’s Nature Relationship Index (NRI) presented by UN Development Report Director Pedro Conceição offers policymakers a practical tool to realign laws, budgets and institutions around the repair and nurturing of relationships—so that thriving ecosystems and human flourishing are seen as co‑produced, rather than traded off. Instead of focusing only on limits, targets or planetary boundaries that restrict human impacts, it proposes the Nature Relationship Index (NRI) as a positive, relational compass: a way to measure how well societies are fostering mutually beneficial relationships between people and the living world.

Critical Zones Africa: Critical Zones Africa, presented by Professor Lesley Green, is a prototype for repairing landscapes and relationships in African ecosystems through a decolonial lens. Working across five sites (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania and Ethiopia), the project studies specific “critical zones” – the thin layer from bedrock to treetops where soils, water, organisms and human societies interact – in order to understand how colonial extraction, agro‑chemicals, infrastructure and unequal financial systems have damaged both ecologies and social relations. Rather than treating landscapes as neutral backdrops or mere resources, CZA explicitly links landscape repair to relational repair, capturing its work in the formula “repair landscapes, repair relations”: tracking how changes in social relations (property, power, racialised labour, community disempowerment) show up in material flows of water, nutrients and contaminants, and how re‑weaving relationships can make places habitable again.

Hear on earth: Culture is a central element in repairing broken relationships with ourselves, others and the living world, Stories, symbols, and shared experiences which help people see themselves as connected rather than separated.  Developed by musician Sam Nester, Hear on Earth is a participatory art–science project that invites people worldwide to share what “care” sounds like in their lives. Whether it is a lullaby, a protest, the crackle of a communal fire, or the steady pulse of a hospital monitor, these recordings are collected and mapped on a dynamic online sound archive. Hear on earth is about helping us reconnect to the diverse manifestations of an identical embodied experience of care -of having been cared for or of caring for others-whether they are humans or more-than-humans- through sound.

References:

Lejano, R. P. (2023). Caring, Empathy, and the Commons: A Relational Theory of Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.

World Health Organization. (2023). Noncommunicable diseases – Key facts.

Mikkelsen, B. et al. (2022). “Non‑communicable diseases cause 74% of global deaths: WHO.” WHO / Invisible Numbers report.

Klepeis, N. E., et al. (2001). “The National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS): A resource for assessing exposure to environmental pollutants.” Journal of Exposure Analysis and Environmental Epidemiology, 11(3), 231–252.

Conceição, P., & UNDP Human Development Report Office. (2025). “Beyond fear and constraints: Forging a new relationship with nature.” UNDP blog (introducing the Nature Relationship Index concept).

Environmental Humanities South, University of Cape Town. (2026). Critical Zones Africa – project description.

Green, L. et al. (2026). “Repairing Landscapes, Repairing Relations: 3 Years of Critical Zones Africa.” Environmental Humanities South.

Nester, S. (2026–). Hear on Earth and related participatory sound works (see for example “Hear Nature’s Songs with Artist Sam Nester – Arcadia” video).