Long Arc Research Organizations

Directory

(original inspiration from [1])

This is a list of research organizations that are focused on the longer arc of human and even cosmic history:

Dark Matter Labs

URL = https://darkmatterlabs.org

Dark Matter Labs is a transdisciplinary research and design collective, founded around 2015 and anchored by Indy Johar and colleagues, that works on the institutional "operating system" of cities and societies. Its work targets the layers that usually go unexamined: governance, finance, regulation, procurement, and the metrics that shape what gets built. Programmes such as Trees as Infrastructure, Neighbourhood Ecosystems and Deep Demonstrations treat these as designable infrastructure rather than fixed background conditions.

Dark Matter Labs frames its longer arc as a decades-scale transition toward regenerative, commons-oriented systems, and publishes much of its thinking as open working papers and provocations. Its interest in new ownership, asset-stewardship and public-purpose financing models makes it a natural reference point for protocol-level civic design.

Buckminster Fuller Institute

URL = https://bfi.org

Founded in 1983 to carry forward the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, the Institute preserves and extends his "comprehensive anticipatory design science": the idea that whole-systems thinking can meet human needs while using fewer resources. Its best-known programme, the Fuller Challenge, has for years recognised and funded initiatives that take a systemic, scalable approach to pressing problems.

Its role in the field is partly curatorial and partly catalytic. It keeps a long intellectual lineage (Spaceship Earth, synergetics, world-game thinking) in circulation and links it to current practitioners in regenerative design and systems change. It operates on a non-commercial, educational footing and frames the work in decades rather than product cycles.

Long Now Foundation

URL = https://longnow.org

Established in 1996 by Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis and others, the Long Now Foundation exists to foster long-term thinking and responsibility, using a 10,000-year horizon as a deliberate counterweight to short-termism. Its projects include the 10,000-Year Clock, the Rosetta Project (an archive of human languages), Long Bets, and the Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

The Foundation works mostly as a cultural and conceptual institution, with a few durable artefacts, rather than as a policy body. For civic R&D it supplies both a vocabulary (pace layers, deep time, "the long now") and working examples of institutions designed to outlast their founders. It is also a useful case of how to build civilisational-scale projects without market or political deadlines.

Commonland

URL = https://commonland.com

Commonland is a not-for-profit established in 2013 that works to restore degraded landscapes by connecting farmers, businesses, investors, governments and NGOs through its "4 Returns" framework. The returns are natural, social, financial and inspirational, pursued over roughly twenty years across three landscape zones. It works with partners in more than 20 countries and states a goal of restoring 100 million hectares by 2040.

Its distinctive contribution is a shared language and a long-horizon method for landscape-scale coordination, with partnership structures and valuation methods that put social and inspirational value alongside financial value. It is a useful reference for governance and finance of place-based commons over generational timescales.

Regen Network

URL = https://regen.network

Regen Network, founded around 2017 by Gregory Landua and collaborators, built a public blockchain (Regen Ledger, on the Cosmos SDK) for issuing, verifying and trading ecological credits and for recording ecological state. It aimed to give regenerative land stewardship a transparent, programmable accounting layer instead of relying on opaque carbon and biodiversity markets.

Civilization Research Institute

URL = https://civilizationresearchinstitute.org

The Civilization Research Institute (CRI) is a US nonprofit research centre, based in Asheville, North Carolina and led by Daniel Schmachtenberger. It focuses on catastrophic and existential risk and on what it calls the "metacrisis": interlinked risks that share underlying drivers. Its stated mission combines actionable knowledge for navigating those risks with basic research and experimentation on viable future forms of global civilisation. It is supported by the Third Attractor Foundation, and The Consilience Project, which publishes on sensemaking, the information commons and governance design, is among its publications.

CRI is part of the discourse on systemic risk, coordination failure and the design of institutions able to handle civilisational-scale complexity. Its emphasis on collective intelligence, foresight and new coordination capacities overlaps with commons and P2P approaches, though it works mainly through research and public discourse rather than building infrastructure.

Living Systems Alliance

https://news.transitionnetwork.org/launch-of-the-living-systems-alliance/

The Living Systems Alliance (LSA) is a recently formed partnership of five organisations: Transition Network International, the Biomimicry Institute, the Global Ecovillage Network, Kincentric Leadership and the Permaculture Association. It aims to accelerate nature-centric decision-making and design. One strand of its work is gathering and sharing stories of communities acting as "keystone species", regenerating the living systems they belong to.

Its significance for the field is as a federation of established grassroots and design networks that are aligning their practice and narrative. It has a bottom-up, relational character and a long-term, place-based orientation.

Repatterning Collective

URL = https://repatterningcollective.org

The Repatterning Collective is a small practitioner collective, associated with Renilde Becqué, that explores how people can sense, shift and "repattern" in and out of states of polycrisis. It runs a "Co-creation with the More-than-Human" sandbox and shares its reflections through a Substack.

Its contribution is experiential and exploratory, working on perception, relationship and response to complex conditions, rather than building institutions or tools. In the context of long-horizon civic R&D it sits at the cultural and inner-work end of the spectrum.