The purpose of this work is the extension of local Gurson-based ductile damage and failure modeling in engineering materials and structures to account for the non-local nature of void coalescence. In particular, the extension pursued here is based on the introduction of an non-local effective damage parameter $\nu$ analogous to that $f_{}^{\ast}$ of Needleman and Tvergaard which is modeled thermodynamically as a scalar-valued continuum microstructural field or generalized phase field via a recent thermodynamic approach. In the simplest case, the resulting field relation for $\nu$ is formally analogous to the inhomogeneous temperature equation. As such, analogous to temperature, $\nu$ represents an additional continuum degree-of-freedom here. And in the complete model, damage and deformation are coupled. Further, the field relation for $\nu$ contains a characteristic length determining the effective dimension of the process zone for void coelescence.