Bioregioning
= "from verb to ‘bioregion’; act of bringing your bioregion into existence through: grounding, connecting, celebrating, belonging." [1]
See also: Bioregional Regeneration
Description
Sara Silva et al. :
"The South Asia bioregional working group, a voluntary network of members reimagining an ecoregional and bioregional governance for South Asia initiated by Democracy Vikalp Sangam (Alternatives Confluence), defines a bioregional approach as “a departure from existing policies and governance systems that tend to focus on the commodification and exploitation of natural resources — water, land, or flora and fauna — for human economic relations.” It emphasizes the responsible and equitable ecosystem use (and relations with) to sustain all life.
New definitions of bioregionalism are being shaped by activists and thinkers such as John Thackara and Isabel Carlisle and the UK Bioregional Learning Center into the emerging language of “bioregioning.” (Hubbard, 2024).
In bioregioning, bioregions are not defined or mapped; rather, they are considered “dynamic, continually and actively co-created by those (human and non-human) that live there.” Bioregioning focuses on the process over the outcome, “cracking open the world into a patchwork of place-based experiments, each unfolding in negotiation between those that live there.” Given there is no one definition of bioregioning, bioregioning does not have a definite “playbook”; rather, it is a “subtle dancing with the system (Wearne et al, 2017). Below is a graphic by the Bioregional Learning Center in Devon describing the ways bioregioning takes place."
(https://ecolise.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Bioregional-Governance-Training-Guide.pdf?)
Discussion
Ellia Hubbard:
"One of the most interesting reworkings of bioregionalism is the emerging language of bioregioning, the verb, being mobilised by activists and thinkers such as John Thackara, Isabel Carlisle and the UK Bioregional Learning Centre. Bioregioning maintains the key provocations of bioregionalism but transposes them into a new register. Rather than seeking to define and map bioregions, looking for their true essence, bioregions are understood as dynamic, continually and actively co-created by those (human and non-human) that live there. Their truest form can never be achieved, and thus the negotiation of our togetherness is always an open question. Bioregioning refuses to know the destination in advance, instead focusing on the process, rather than outcome, of change. This turns the bioregion into a political project with the possibility of a radical critique of power.
Bioregioning cracks open the world into a patchwork of place-based experiments, each unfolding in negotiation between those that live there. Such an image is hopeful yet filled with tension, simultaneously dizzyingly complex yet brimming with opportunity."