Emerge IDG 2023–2025 · Stockholm
The dedicated record of Emerge's work with the Inner Development Goals and the Cohere+ consortium – three years of shared inquiry into what coherence is, and how it arises among people working for change.
Emerge Institute is one of several organisations that grew from a common root. Ekskäret Foundation – the Swedish foundation dedicated to inner development and civilisational transformation – co-founded both the Inner Development Goals initiative and the Emerge Initiative: IDG as an applied framework translating inner capacities into practical tools for leaders and change-makers, and Emerge as the field-building and intellectual platform exploring what is genuinely emerging at the edges of culture, consciousness, and systems change.
These were not parallel projects running in separate lanes. In the years before the IDG Foundation was formally established, Emerge and Ekskäret functioned as informal learning laboratories, and many of the people who went on to shape IDG were already deeply involved in Emerge. The two organisations carry this shared genealogy forward as sister institutions – distinct in form and function, but drawing from the same well.
It is against this background that the Cohere+ project takes on particular significance – not merely as an external collaboration, but as an expression of what becomes possible when this constellation of people and institutions works together in sustained inquiry.
What was Cohere+?
Cohere+ was a three-year Erasmus+ funded research project running from 2022 to 2025, bringing together a European consortium of organisations to investigate a deceptively simple question: what is coherence, and how does it arise – or fail to arise – among people working together for social change?
The consortium included the Institute for Integral Studies (IFIS) in Freiburg, Life Itself, The Hague Center for Global Governance, Innovation and Emergence, the Center for Human Emergence DACH, and Emerge. Over three years, the project mapped more than three hundred organisations working for transformative social change across Europe, co-authored a chapter for the IDG book published by De Gruyter, developed a learning platform with courses and resources on coherence, and conducted civic round-tables in communities across Germany. It also produced a substantial body of written work – profiles, essays, and research reflections published through Emerge's platform at whatisemerging.com.
The working definition the group arrived at after three years was this: a state of harmony and alignment where all parts of a system work in sync to support the whole, as well as the freedom and efficiency of its parts, in order to actualise its goals. But the more important finding was less definitional and more phenomenological.
Coherence is not something you engineer or impose. It arises – when it does – through shared inquiry, genuine difference held without premature resolution, and a willingness to stay with discomfort rather than escape it. It is felt before it is understood.
Emerge at the IDG Summits
One of the most visible expressions of the Emerge–IDG relationship during this period was Emerge's presence at the IDG Summits in Stockholm – in both 2023 and 2024, with workshops that each drew more than a hundred participants.
These workshops were not peripheral events. They sat at the integration point of the Summit programme, bringing participants into facilitated inquiry on precisely the questions that Cohere+ was investigating: what does coherence feel like in practice, what conditions allow it to arise, and what prevents it? For many participants, these sessions were among the most practically memorable parts of the Summit – not because they delivered answers, but because they created conditions in which something genuine could surface.
This presence reflected something important about the relationship between the two institutions. IDG had developed rigorous frameworks for identifying and cultivating the inner capacities needed for civilisational change. Emerge had been building, since its inception, a field of intellectual and experiential inquiry into what those capacities actually feel like to develop – in groups, in culture, at the edges of what conventional institutions can hold. The Summits became a site where these two streams met in practice.
The intellectual contribution – Anne Caspari's three essays on coherence.
Published on whatisemerging.comi.
Chasing Coherence.
A phenomenology of genuine group process – the often prolonged and uncomfortable chaos phase a group must move through before something new can genuinely emerge. Coherence arises when a group stops trying to control the process and allows its filters to fall away.
ii.
The Trouble with Participative Group Processes.
The traps that prevent coherence from forming even among skilled, well-intentioned people – and the sharp distinction between cohesion, groups holding together through comfortable agreement, and coherence, something new becoming possible through the resonance of difference.
iii.
Transformative Processes at Scale.
Why collective transformation does not scale linearly from individual development. Groups evolve by different principles than individuals develop – a call to think more carefully about how individual depth and collective change actually relate.
Why this matters for Emerge Institute
Cohere+ demonstrated what becomes possible when the field works together at depth over time. It also surfaced the unfinished question that Emerge Institute is now positioned to take further.
IDG has mapped the capacities. Cohere+ has investigated the conditions for coherence in groups working for change. What remains largely unexplored is the deeper question: how does genuine interior development – not just skill acquisition or values alignment, but the kind of transformation that changes how a person perceives, relates, and acts – become available at the scale that the civilisational moment requires?
This is the space Emerge Institute inhabits. Not replacing the frameworks that IDG and others have built, but going deeper into the formation question: what does it actually take for human beings to develop the interiority that the challenges of our time demand – and how do we design institutions, programmes, and communities that make that possible for more than a fortunate few?
The sister institutions continue their work. The inquiry deepens.
Stockholm · IDG Summits