Austin Wade Smith on the Core Patterns of Bioregional Governance

Discussion

Austin Wade Smith writes:

"1 - Specific bioregional definitions of value must be governed by bodies of local human and more-than-human actors which form working consensus on local definitions of flourishing. You can call those bodies Ecological Institutions.

2 - Ecological Institutions (EI's for short) are an evolution of non-human personhood vis-à-vis earth law. Its a framework for the legibility of ecosystems, not just through law, but through economics, technology, and politics. Put another way, ecological niche construction in socio-technical systems.

3 - My colleagues and I believe that blockchains, and distributed digital addressing systems, **can** support essential patterns of commoning and mutualism. The most interesting thing to know about DAOs is that they can be a continuation of the commons movement. Hybrid commons - both biophysical and digital. So DAOs are commons. Bioregional governance is rooted in these hybrid biological and data commons.

4 - Bioregions get a lot of interest, but they have an important correlate. Guilds, or affinity based commons. Diverse knowledge in shared territory is the basis of bioregional commons. However, diverse actors holding shared knowledge / affinity is the domain of guilds. How we design the interaction between the two is a core question of bioregional governance.

5 - This one is my favorite right now. Every measure / metric is an agreement. Standards are based on consensus. Bioregions and locales must govern their own. The basis of any bioregional value system is the governance of what indices or measures are used to define wellbeing in a place. Bioregional governance of the "terms" / parameters / indices used to define local regeneration underpin all value mechanics. What should be included?

6 - Bioregional governance is the process of articulating sacred, situated, and contextually held knowledge into schemas that are legible to economic, legal, and technical systems. That's nuanced to say the least. *One way to think about governance is that its a shared effort to maintain the integrity of collective beliefs as they are translated across different domains.*

7 - Closer. There are several other really important domains where bioregional governance is fundamental. Regen Foundation is sandboxing governance at the local level for all these points. We are probably most excited about the relationship of bioregional governance and data verification / validation. Its basically the holy grail. MRV and governance, in one sense, are fundamentally related. Particularly when we recognize the bio - cultural dimension of regeneration."

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