Nurture capitals are the four forms of capital — social, cultural, spiritual, and living — that Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua name as the pools from which living systems spring, and which an enterprise must replenish before it can produce the rest.
The term comes from 📝Regenerative Enterprise (2013), which builds on the authors' 📝8 Forms of Capital. Roland and Landua argue that these pools "must be replenished," and that "they must be nurtured – not pushed, or coerced, or harassed into increasing, but lovingly and carefully supported to re-sprout and re-grow" (p. 24). The remaining four forms — financial, material, intellectual, and experiential — are what a healthy system yields once the nurture capitals are cared for.
The concept is the book's answer to triple-bottom-line business, which at best tends to "do no harm" to ecological and social systems while protecting financial returns (p. 24). Doing no harm is not enough when the foundation is already depleted. The book's rule is that "a regenerative enterprise must cultivate the fundamental health of the four nurture capitals in order to optimize long-term production of all eight forms of capital" (p. 25), illustrated by New Forest Farm in Wisconsin, which rebuilt soil through 📝permaculture and then harvested financial, material, and intellectual capital from the healthier system.
The same four capitals define the purpose of a regenerative enterprise ecology: a network of enterprises that "must articulate its core purpose as the restoration and development of living, social, spiritual, and cultural capital" (p. 35).