Development has traditionally been investigated within separate disciplinary traditions, producing influential theories of biological evolution, cognitive development, systems organisation, human capability, civilisational change, and self-organisation. While these theories provide robust explanations within their respective domains, there remains no widely accepted conceptual framework that explains how the recurring operational processes underlying development relate across disciplines. This paper introduces Cvolution, an original recursive meta-theoretical framework developed through comparative conceptual synthesis of eight influential theories associated with Aristotle, Darwin, Piaget, Bertalanffy, Sen, Toynbee, Prigogine, and Spencer. Cvolution identifies a recurring five-stage operational architecture comprising Conditions, Organisation, Capability, Adaptation, and Evolution, in which evolutionary outcomes recursively generate the conditions for subsequent developmental cycles. Rather than replacing established theories, the framework integrates their complementary insights into a coherent higher-order structure while preserving their domain-specific explanatory strengths. The framework is illustrated through organisational development to demonstrate its interpretive applicability beyond the domains from which it was derived. Its conceptual contribution, falsifiability, limitations, and potential for empirical operationalisation are discussed. Cvolution is presented as a conceptual framework and research programme rather than an empirically validated theory.
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