CARE ECOSYSTEMS FOR REGENERATIVE FUTURES: SOCIAL AND COMMUNITY RESPONSES TO DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION AND THE CHALLENGES OF CARE
Demographic, social and environmental transformations are profoundly altering the ways societies produce, distribute and sustain care. Increasing longevity, the rise in chronic illness and frailty, together with changes in family structures, urbanization, migration, shifts in labor, and growing social inequalities, have weakened traditional mechanisms of care provision, giving rise to a global care crisis. This scenario poses challenges for governments, health and social protection systems, communities, and people who require care. In response, regenerative development proposes moving beyond a view centered solely on sustainability and impact reduction, orienting actions instead toward the regeneration of the social and ecological systems that sustain life.
In recent decades, various theoretical currents have helped position care as a central element for sustaining life. The ethics of care understands it as an activity oriented toward maintaining, repairing and sustaining the shared world, while other perspectives emphasize its moral and political character, grounded in interdependence and collective responsibility. From the logic of care, care ceases to be a standardized response and becomes a practical, relational and ongoing process, in which caregivers and care recipients jointly build solutions adapted to changing contexts. For its part, the Care Collective proposes the need to move toward universal care through shared infrastructures and public spaces that strengthen mutual support at all levels of society.
Building on this conceptual dialogue, the symposium proposes the concept of care ecosystems as an integrative framework for understanding the relationships, resources, policies, institutions and practices that make the provision and sustainability of care possible in territories. Inspired by the ecological perspective on human development, this approach conceives care as a social infrastructure made up of interdependent networks of actors, environments and institutions interacting from microsystems to macrosystems. This makes it possible to analyze how intersectoral articulation, community participation and collaborative governance strengthen the capacity of territories to provide care.
Several initiatives from the past decade illustrate this transformation: integrated care systems, caring cities and territories, community health strategies, and compassionate communities. Although emerging in different contexts, all promote social co-responsibility, mobilizing schools, workplaces, community organizations, religious institutions, neighborhoods, etc., to expand collective care capacities beyond conventional health services.
The symposium will bring together researchers, public policy officials, health professionals, community leaders and territorial actors to analyze how these approaches can help address the global care crisis and build more equitable, resilient and regenerative societies. It proposes to exchange experiences developed in Latin America and discuss policies and innovations to strengthen care ecosystems from an intersectoral perspective, contributing to the debate on regenerative futures by recognizing care as a common good and an essential infrastructure for collective well-being.
