In recent years, a striking convergence has begun to emerge across intellectual, policy, and civic landscapes: the recognition that humanity must begin to think and act at the scale of the planet. The Berggruen Institute, a global think-and-do tank, has been among the most visible voices in promoting what it calls Planetary Thinking. At the same time, the Alternative Planetary Futures Institute (Ap-Fi) has advanced a complementary yet distinct framework centered on Planetary Consciousness. While the two projects come from different traditions and methodologies, their overlap opens a fertile space for dialogue, synergy, and joint action.
Shared Foundations
Both the Berggruen Institute and Ap-Fi begin with the conviction that the nation-state, as the dominant frame of political, cultural, and ethical imagination, is no longer adequate to address 21st-century transformations. Whether the challenge is climate change, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, mass migration, or the erosion of political legitimacy, the scale of the problem is planetary.
Both initiatives also seek to bridge East and West, North and South, affirming that planetary futures cannot be built from the vantage point of one tradition alone. Berggruen does this by fostering cross-cultural philosophical dialogues, while Ap-Fi does so by recovering ancient wisdom traditions such as Indo-Iranic, Mesopotamian, and Hellenic heritages alongside contemporary foresight practices. In both cases, the emphasis is on pluralism, interconnectedness, and the recognition of humanity’s shared destiny.
Differences in Orientation
Where the Berggruen Institute frames its work around governance innovation, institutional design, and philosophical inquiry, Ap-Fi places greater emphasis on ethical transformation, mythic imagination, and the evolution of identity.
Berggruen Institute’s Planetary Thinking centers on reimagining political legitimacy in the Anthropocene. Its outputs—such as the Berggruen Governance Index, high-level convenings, and the prestigious Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture—speak primarily to policymakers, intellectuals, and global leaders. Its orientation is institutional, elite-driven, and designed to shape the architecture of governance in an era of great transformation.
Ap-Fi’s Planetary Consciousness, by contrast, seeks to awaken communities and individuals to the noosphere, to the possibility of an evolutionary leap in self-understanding. Its seven guiding principles—Evolving the Self, Loving the Other, Stewarding the Planet, Praising Life, Revering the Cosmos, Empowering the Virtual, Enriching Complexity—are ethical beacons meant to steer humanity toward deeper enriched complexity, ecological stewardship, and spiritual maturity. Its methods—horizon scanning, macrohistorical analysis, and cosmological imagination—invite broad participation and grassroots engagement.
In essence, Berggruen operates at the level of political institutions, while Ap-Fi works at the level of human consciousness and collective identity.
Synergies and Complementarity
These differences are not obstacles but potential synergies. Planetary governance without planetary consciousness risks becoming technocratic and hollow, lacking the moral depth and spiritual energy needed for legitimacy. Conversely, planetary consciousness without pathways to governance risks remaining aspirational, unable to shape the institutions that structure everyday life.
Here, Berggruen and Ap-Fi can complement each other.
Berggruen’s institutional scaffolding could provide the forums, structures, and political pathways for implementing the ethical insights of planetary consciousness.
Ap-Fi’s ethical and imaginative frameworks could infuse Berggruen’s institutional designs with meaning, legitimacy, and resonance across cultures.
Together, they form two halves of a greater whole: one ensuring structures for cooperation, the other ensuring depth of vision.
The Necessity of Higher Attention
Why does this area of research, advocacy, and education deserve greater attention? Simply put: the crises of our time are planetary in scope. Addressing them demands more than incremental policy fixes or isolated national efforts. It requires:
A planetary ethics—an understanding of ourselves as one species among many, embedded in the life systems of Earth.
A planetary imagination—a capacity to envision futures beyond the limits of inherited paradigms.
A planetary governance—institutions capable of acting at the right scale with legitimacy and inclusiveness.
The emerging field of planetary thinking/consciousness is one of the few intellectual and practical domains that attempts to weave these dimensions together. For this reason, it should be seen not as a peripheral or utopian pursuit, but as a central agenda for the 21st century.
Toward a Shared Future
The dialogue between initiatives like the Berggruen Institute and Ap-Fi is not merely comparative; it is generative. Both traditions affirm that humanity stands at a threshold of transformation. Both insist that our inherited categories—nation, religion, economy, identity—must be reimagined. Both call us to widen the horizon of our responsibility and care.
If Berggruen represents the architects of planetary institutions, and Ap-Fi the poets of planetary consciousness, then together they can help humanity imagine and build a future worthy of our shared destiny. The challenge now is to bring these streams into dialogue, to foster a planetary community of research, advocacy, and education that is as inclusive, ambitious, and imaginative as the times demand.
