Contemporary social, political, economic, and ecological dilemmas, as well as the myriad collaborative efforts to overcome such challenges, require adaptive yet enduring strategies to promote societies that enhance the quality of life and foster structures that encourage collaborative approaches to balancing the needs and interests of all actors in the global system, both now and into the future. We refer to the pursuit of a system that simultaneously promotes individual wellbeing and enhances collective welfare, as the process of sustainable human development (SHD). There is increasing global awareness of the degrees to which environmental, social and economic systems are interconnected, and likewise that they exert on each other complex, non-linear influence across various temporal, spatial, and social scales of aggregation. We propose a research agenda that will interrogate this interconnectivity to explore the fundamental nature, components and essential parameters of SHD. The research agenda will incorporate theory development with case study analysis and empirical research to test and refine the parameters of SHD, and thereby build knowledge on the essence of sustainability and the avenues for pursuing it.