Bioregional Regeneration
Discussion
Sara Silva et al. :
"“Climate adaptations, being rooted in highly specific landscape and socioeconomic vulnerabilities, require more tailored and advanced technical support to villages” (World Bank, 2023). This recognition by the World Bank of the importance of support in consideration of landscape-specific socioeconomic vulnerabilities is one of the reasons why bioregional governance can help enhance the capacity of a place and its people for climate adaptation.
Most ecosystem restoration programs or projects already have global standard operating procedures, from the planning stage to implementation and evaluation. What bioregional governance offers is an added value to enhance the process of collaboration across members of a bioregion coming from a deeper context of the realities of a place’s natural ecosystems, its culture through the people, and its capacity for better leadership through bioregional stewards. This governance process invites a regenerative approach to development.
Recognizing the need to heal the limitations of development, bioregional governance offers not just a similar approach to above given its strong priority to localization and inclusion, but also one that is more aligned in context and in depth with its rootedness to the nested aspects of place, people, and purpose. Most dominant development models are still within the frame of sustainable development, which focuses on reducing harm whereas bioregional regeneration goes beyond and focuses on systemic transformation by doing more.
There is an increasingly growing movement to shift from sustainability to regeneration. But what is the difference? In general, sustainability aims to do less harm but regeneration means to do more good.
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Regenerative development and design thought leaders Bill Reed (2009) and Daniel Christian Wahl (2016) shared that depending on the paradigm from which we work, we are capable of either adding and reducing value to our systems. Reed’s Regenesis Institute developed a framework for regenerative design and development: he proposed that the field of regeneration goes beyond the avoidance of future destruction but also acknowledges the historical ecological impacts from human activity in conventional ways that it has been applied.
The diagram above shows that regenerative development requires less energy and offers more integrity and integration. By working with nature and as nature, we apply solutions that have already been evolving and adapting for a long time. We create the enabling conditions for life to thrive instead of just surviving.
Meanwhile, the second map by Re-Alliance on the next page shows that designing for regeneration offers more sovereignty and agency when we design with nature; it goes beyond the dependency model created by aid and the neutral stance of sustainability often co-opted by extractive economies and industries to justify their impact to the environment.
While this is more relevant in context with communities devastated by climate related disasters and displacement, it can be used to explore any redesign of climate resilience agendas from an extractive and dependent model into a life giving and interdependent one. An example can be shifting towards renewables through a just transition approach, ensuring locally inclusive means of adapting technologies for energy that are not sourced from fossil fuels and other GHG emitting elements but one that can be fre.ely regenerated through nature such as solar or wind energy. Seed sovereignty through saving of heirloom seeds ensure that farmers can continue saving and propagating seeds instead of being dependent on GMO companies producing GMO seeds that cannot be reproduced, therefore requiring farmers to continue purchasing them after every farming cycle."
(https://ecolise.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Bioregional-Governance-Training-Guide.pdf?)