There is a particular kind of silence at the end of things – a silence that is a pause before the next breath. This is the last Update from THE NEW INSTITUTE as you have known it. The fellowship program, with its unexpected assembly of thinkers, doers, and dreamers, will not continue in its current form. What comes next is unwritten. We are, once again, in the business of rethinking.

This past year, we circled the root system of capitalism, asking what must be transformed, and who gets to decide. We did so not alone but with a unique mix of scholars and practitioners – people who seldom share space and daily bread, and who provoked and inspired each other, turning abstract ideas into live questions, and live questions into the seedlings of tomorrow’s action.

Six programs approached this question from plural angles: futures and failures, food and finance, planetary governance, and the bitter logic of war. We welcomed 55 fellows – academics and practitioners, spanning twenty countries and four continents – into a resident, intellectual experiment. There were debates and alliances, predictions of collapse and insistence on hope. Some ideas, like Africapitalism, broke through: Nigeria adopted it as national policy. Other visions – the future of food, a global environmental court, new paths for degrowth and finance – are still taking shape. THE NEW INSTITUTE planted seeds for the future; the real work, and its impacts, will unfold long after the tables have been cleared.

At the closing conference, the mood was searching and forward looking. We faced the hard edges of institutional limits, the familiar gap between knowledge and action. The dream of a seamless bridge between thinking and doing gave way to the reality: the bridge must be built brick by brick, and sometimes we must learn to swim through the current.

Questions proliferated: How do we move from talk to transformation, especially facing a planetary emergency? What does implementation mean when the world is fractured by climate, conflict, and inequality?

Photo by Luzia Cruz

Perhaps the most enduring impact of THE NEW INSTITUTE lies in the way it nurtured a space where difference became dialogue and debate, forging not only ideas, but unexpected bonds. It was a rare environment where theory could meet practice, where scholars were challenged by activists, and practitioners found room to question assumptions. Trust grew slowly, in the tension between conviction and openness, disagreement and empathy. Conviviality was never an afterthought; friendship and shared humanity were essential to making difficult conversations possible and fruitful.

What emerged from this experiment was no tidy manifesto, but a living network of conversations, collaborations, and commitments that will, we hope, outlast this moment and this place. If this is THE NEW INSTITUTE’s true contribution, it is a humble one: a platform where imagination, rigor, and care converged to spark something new, ever-evolving, and unfinished.

Photo by Sabine Vielmo

There are moments when an idea escapes the page and takes root in the world. This year, the Africapitalism program, a flagship initiative that flourished at THE NEW INSTITUTE, crossed the threshold from speculation to reality. What began as debate and communal drafting sessions has now become policy: the Nigerian government has adopted Africapitalism’s core principles – communal entrepreneurship, inclusive growth, sustainable development – into its national strategy, marking one of those rare inflection points when academic innovation finds its echo in government halls and community workshops alike.

Africapitalism is not just politically and economically installed; it is helping to shape the mindset of a new generation. Adopted into academic curricula and student clubs in some higher institutions in Nigeria and South Africa, its influence will reach countless students. The program also enjoys significant institutional support, including pioneering financial backing from IHS Nigeria, Africa Business Affairs, Luiss University, Access Bank Plc, and First Bank Nigeria. This signals its deepening integration into the country’s economic infrastructure.

A new short film captures the scope of this transformation, documenting an extraordinary confluence of fellows, policymakers, business leaders, and grassroots organizers as they reimagined "development" for an age of shared agency. The film distills those urgent conversations – from the complexity of implementation to the ethics of scaling impact – a testament that bold ideas, when anchored in local realities, indeed find their way into laws, budgets, and everyday life.

For those eager to carry this momentum forward, the new Africapitalism Handbook offers a practical entry point. It is a manual for anyone determined to cultivate shared prosperity and convinced that dignity and agency, when seeded locally, can grow into collective transformation.

Under the guidance of Maja Groff, the Planetary Governance program tackled the immense challenge of turning global awareness of the planetary crisis into binding action. Moving beyond abstract ideals, the program focused on advancing practical proposals, such as the creation of an International Environmental Court to hold states accountable, the strategic strengthening of global governance through a reimagined Global Environment Agency, and the pursuit of a UN Declaration of Planetary Emergency to offer official recognition of Earth system risks.

THE NEW INSTITUTE served as a critical space for convening diverse voices, from experts and policymakers to civil society, enabling the difficult but necessary work of coalition building and consensus forging. This patient, painstaking process is vital to crafting governance capable of meeting the scale and complexity of today’s emergencies. Upcoming policy briefs will build on this work by translating visionary urgency into practical instruments for stewarding a precarious planet.

Photo by Maximilian Glas

What if the global food system isn’t failing, but functioning exactly as designed: for a powerful few? This was the provocative starting point for The Future of Food program, chaired by José Luis Chicoma. Over the past year, a diverse group of fellows traced the contours of power hidden in every grain sown, every seed patented, every bite consumed – revealing who controls the system and, crucially, who is left out.

Behind the scale and productivity of today’s food system lies fragility: billions remain undernourished, ecosystems are eroded, and supply chains buckle under climate shocks and conflict. A handful of corporations dominate seeds, fertilizers, markets, and narratives. Crop diversity has been squeezed out, while marginalized communities bear the costs.

Rejecting narrow technical fixes, the program placed power at its heart. What if transformation meant redistributing control over land, knowledge, markets, and governance? How do we reimagine food systems that are truly equitable, democratic, and resilient?

From international policy halls to local markets, our fellows challenged entrenched subsidies, championed agroecology, recognized the essential role of informal economies, and insisted on democratic stewardship of land and plate alike.

Their work culminates this autumn in the Future of Food: Power and Biodiversity report – a sharp policy blueprint exposing who profits from the status quo and outlining bold, systemic shifts toward decentralized, just, and ecologically grounded food systems. A companion volume will follow next year, deepening the analysis of power’s relentless hold and the stakes of change.

Photo by Maximilian Glas

Finance began as a tool to manage risk, making uncertainty tradable. Over time, it evolved into a creative force shaping futures and realities – transforming Homo Economicus into Homo Speculans, the speculator betting on precarious tomorrows.

This was the provocative starting point for the Futures of Capitalism program, led by sociologist Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou. Together with an interdisciplinary group of fellows, he developed the concept of a “speculation spectrum”: a heuristic revealing how financial phenomena oscillate between stability and volatility depending on their cultural context. From pensions to crypto, risk is never fixed, and speculation can sometimes empower marginalized communities.

Out of this grew Collapse Finance, a new framework that rethinks finance’s role not just as profiteer from crises, but also as a site where radically new financial imaginaries are born. The world of finance, inherently generative, participates actively in systemic collapse and recovery. To understand these dynamics is to glimpse potential futures beyond current crisis.

The program concluded with an experimental conversation on building uncomfortable alliances and addressing challenging audiences – calling for sustained inquiry and action. The launch of the Collapse Finance booklet and the Global Consortium for Rethinking Capitalism (GCRC) ensures this critical work continues globally, with a documentary due this September.

Photo by Maximilian Glas

Capitalism is not just failing us; it is the root of our crises. Beyond Capitalism is arguably one of our boldest programs yet, rejecting easy reform. The program asserts that "green capitalism" is a myth, particularly in the Global North, and that genuine transformation necessitates dismantling the logic that prioritizes profit over necessity, thereby exacerbating ecological deterioration and inequality.

Drawing on radical traditions from Marx to Otto Neurath, the program explored what socialism might mean in a world on the brink. Could democratic planning replace markets—not by repeating old dogmas, but as a pluralistic, ecologically bounded system of collective care? How can governance respond effectively to limited resources and overlapping crises without sliding into authoritarianism?

Kohei Saito framed these urgent questions through his vision of a "war economy" focused on survival, immediate decarbonization, and preserving justice and solidarity. He provocatively proposed a “green dictatorship”– not a tyranny, but a form of post-liberal democracy that must evolve to meet collapsing realities.

At its core, Beyond Capitalism developed a manifesto for ecosocialism: liberating nature from capitalist commodification, abolishing class structures, decentralizing knowledge, and building democratically governed economies based on need. It calls for rewilding landscapes, reducing meat consumption, challenging the ownership of knowledge, and embracing meaningful, dignified work over alienation.

Amid the looming threat of collapse, the program’s fellows insist: democratic survival is both essential and feasible.

This was no conference presenting easy answers. It was a gathering of unfinished thoughts. The future of THE NEW INSTITUTE is, fittingly, uncertain. The fellowship program – this experiment in collective thinking and doing – has run its course. But the work persists. The conversations, the networks, the friendships, the debates, and the projects unfinished continue to ripple outward.

What comes next will not look like what came before. The shape is unknown. The only certainty is that the need for re-thinking – of capitalism, of community, of care, of knowledge –remains urgent.

We close not with finality, but with an invitation. Thank you for being part of this chapter. We look forward to the next, in whatever form it may take.