Regenerative Economics
The Concept
S
Definition
"Regenerative economics is an economic system that works to regenerate capital assets, which are assets that provide goods and/or services that are required for or contribute to our well being."
2. Capital Institute
'Regenerative Economics is the application of nature’s laws and patterns of systemic health, self-organization, self-renewal, and regenerative vitality to socioeconomic systems. "
(https://capitalinstitute.org/regenerative-capitalism/)
Description
1.
Michael Haupt:
“Regenerative Economics: Economic activity organized around maintaining and restoring the substrate on which all production depends: soil, water, biological complexity, social cohesion, and the coordination capacity to steward them across time. Regenerative Economics encompasses regenerative agriculture, bioregional economics, commons governance, cooperative enterprise, community currencies, landscape restoration, and related disciplines. The structural logic is retain, restore, circulate, and coordinate. They are phases of the same civilizational growth curve: Throughput Economics built the material infrastructure during the ascending phase; Regenerative Economics organizes the maintenance of that infrastructure and its ecological base as the growth curve reaches its carrying capacity.”
(https://frameros.substack.com/p/bioconomy?)
2.
"Regenerative cultures are unique expressions of the potential inherent in the people and places of a given bioregion. They add value and health to the nested wholeness from local, to regional, to global in the understanding that human thriving critically depends on healthy ecosystems and a life-supporting biosphere.
In strengthening regenerative economic activities, we need to learn to balance: efficiency and resilience; collaboration and competition; diversity and coherence; and small, medium, and large organizations and needs.
In other words, regenerative economics is an economic system that works to regenerate capital assets, which are assets that provide goods and/or services that are required for or contribute to our well being. We need to recognize the earth as the original capital asset without trying to reduce the intrinsic value of life to only utilitarian value to humanity, nor trying to make living capital convertible to financial capital as that would enable the most dangerous form of enclosure of the remaining ecological commons!
Regenerative leadership is a process [of personal development that aligns] one’s own way of being and actions with the wider pattern of life’s evolutionary journey within the communities, ecosystems, biosphere and Universe [we participate in].
As Janine Benyus has said so succinctly: “Life creates conditions conducive to life.” Regenerative Cultures aim to emulate this insight in how we relate to the human family and all life."
History
Benjamin Life:
"The field of regenerative economics offers us a discipline, a genealogy, a literature, and a growing body of practice.
Its ancestors are the heterodox economists of the twentieth century kept in the footnotes:
- E.F. Schumacher insisting that scale itself is an economic variable;
- Herman Daly building the case that the economy is a subsystem of the biosphere and not the reverse;
- Donella Meadows among the first to say the quiet part out loud when describing the limits to extractive economic growth;
- Wendell Berry keeping alive the old agrarian knowledge that an economy is a household before it is a market;
- Elinor Ostrom winning the Nobel Prize in Economics for proving, against the tragedy-of-the-commons myth, that communities govern shared resources successfully all the time, given the right design principles.
What has happened in the last fifteen years is that these tributaries converged into a holistic research and design language, assembled now from coherent layers, each their own body of work that deserves to be honored.
- At the deepest layer sits the language that first bridged classical economic thinking into the regenerative paradigm, the first principles of an economy modeled on life.
- John Fullerton, the former JPMorgan managing director who founded the Capital Institute, gave the field its most rigorous articulation in Regenerative Capitalism, deriving eight principles that living systems share: right relationship, holistic wealth, robust circulation, empowered participation, honoring community and place, edge effect abundance, seeking balance, and innovative, adaptive, and responsive. His argument hinges on the realization that an economy embodying these principles is not a moral luxury but the only kind that survives its own success.
- Gregory Landua and Ethan Roland contributed the field’s foundational ontology, the Eight Forms of Capital, which recognizes financial capital as one currency among eight: social, material, living, intellectual, experiential, spiritual, and cultural. They made visible the truth every community member knows and every balance sheet refutes: most of the value produced in an economy never touches a bank. Landua then carried the ontology into infrastructure, co-founding Regen Network to make ecological state itself legible and verifiable: soil carbon, biodiversity, watershed health recorded and credited on a public ledger so that regeneration could become something an economy accounts for rather than merely aspires to achieve.
- Ferananda Ibarra, through her work with the MetaCurrency and Holochain projects, extended Landua’s plural accounting methods through her work on asset-backed currencies, informed by the thesis that currents or value flows that can be made visible (current-see) will eventually become self-regulating through adaptive response.
- And Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics gave the whole endeavor its boundary conditions, redrawing the economist’s frame as a ring bounded by the social foundation every human requires and the ecological ceiling no economy may breach, a frame concrete enough that Amsterdam adopted it as municipal policy, proving the doughnut is something a real place can actually govern by.
- Beneath the language runs the mythology that conditions our understanding of economics at the root.
- Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics is the fullest excavation of that mythology. Drawing on the anthropology of the gift, he showed that human communities are constituted not through barter but through giving. A gift extends a bond where a finished transaction severs one. He also observes that money as we have built it is a primary technology of that severance, a universal solvent that renders all things commensurable and, in so doing, dissolves the uniqueness-in-relationship that makes a thing sacred. Its engine is interest, which compels the endless conversion of gift and commons into commodity and manufactures scarcity in the midst of real abundance. Yet his is finally a redemptive argument rather than a renunciatory one: money itself can be made sacred, designed to circulate rather than accumulate, backed by the wealth of the commons, an agent of connection rather than separation.
Where Eisenstein works at the level of myth, ...
- Lynne Twist works at the level of the collective nervous system. Decades of raising and allocating capital across the full range of human circumstance, from the boardrooms of billionaires to villages in the grip of famine, convinced her that scarcity is not a truth about the world but a lens placed over it: the reflexive conviction, running beneath conscious thought, that there is not enough, that more is better, and that this is simply the way things are. In The Soul of Money, she shows how the scarcity driving our economic behavior is not a fact about the world but a wound in our relationship to it, that money is a carrier of intention, and flows toward whatever we truly commit to. Her essential move is to deny us the usual exit, because the answer to scarcity is not abundance, which means only “more than enough,” and so still takes its measure from lack, but sufficiency: not an amount at all but a stance, the recognition that what is already present is enough, and that we ourselves are enough. From that ground, money changes character, becoming less a substance to accumulate than a current to direct. Like water, it carries whatever intention we send through it, and what we give our attention to is what grows.
- At the institutional layer, the breakthrough came in 2024 with Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet, lead-authored by Samantha Power of The BioFi Project and Leon Seefeld with collaborators at Dark Matter Labs and the Buckminster Fuller Institute. Its diagnosis is exacting: enormous pools of capital are beginning to flow toward “nature,” and if they flow through the existing financial architecture they will reproduce the extraction they claim to remedy because the people best positioned to regenerate a place are precisely those whose projects remain structurally illegible to capital. Its answer is a family of new financial institutions: the bioregional trust, venture studio, investment company, and bank, phased in as a bioregion matures, functioning as what Power calls the “connective tissue between centralized financial resources and the mycelial network of regeneration.”
- At the socio-political architectural layer sits cosmolocalism, the design pattern developed by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, Jose Ramos, and the peer-to-peer economics tradition. Its principle is elegant: knowledge and design are global commons; production and governance are locally sovereign. The global network amplifies local capacity instead of extracting from it. The pattern has been tested at a scale most movements only theorize. In 2013, the government of Ecuador commissioned Bauwens to lead the FLOK Society process (Free/Libre Open Knowledge) the first attempt anywhere to design a national transition to a commons-based economy. Housed at the IAEN national university and developed in dialogue with buen vivir, the indigenous Andean philosophy of collective flourishing-in-place that Ecuador had already written into its 2008 constitution alongside the rights of nature, FLOK produced an integrated Commons Transition Plan with fifteen legislative frameworks, the first time a concrete third way, neither statist nor neoliberal, existed as implementable policy rather than critique. The political window closed in Ecuador, suddenly and silently cancelled by government officials. Ecuador recommitted to its extractive economy, leasing its forests to mining interests, and the plan was shelved. But Bauwens’ own retrospective on the process contains a seed this essay is attempting to germinate. The next iteration of the commons transition, he concluded, could not stop at knowledge commons. It would have to extend to the physical commonification of land, money, and labor themselves. FLOK may have died in Quito, a cautionary tale for any regenerative economist seeking to implement commons-based peer production in partnership with a state that is deeply embedded in neoliberal economic policy and structurally trapped by natural resource rent-seeking extraction, but Bauwens’ research corpus is part of our collective inheritance, ready to be picked up and implemented bioregionally.
- And at the level of place-based economies and liberatory pedagogy, Joe Brewer’s Design Pathway For Regenerating Earth lays out a practical, systems-based framework for navigating ecological overshoot and civilization-scale collapse by organizing human societies around regenerative, bioregional economies. His central insight is that all truly sustainable human cultures in history were organized as bioregional economies, social and economic systems scaled to the ecological and cultural boundaries of a place. The book’s pathway calls for building a planet-wide network of such “learning ecosystems” that can support the emergence of regenerative bioregions during and after further collapse. Joe’s work with his partner Penny Heiple on the Design School for Regenerating Earth has seeded a planetary network of these bioregional learning centers, the learning ecosystems his book describes. Joe’s work combines the pedagogical dimension, seeing education as a radical and liberatory and necessary precondition of bioregional economic formation, and local community organizing methodologies that mirror how living systems function. Metabolic, a global think tank for the regenerative economy, has drawn inspiration from Joe’s bioregional learning centers vision, publishing a report in early 2026 detailing the structural considerations behind what they call biohubs, a similar concept with additional economic infrastructure.
< Stack these layers over one another and we arrive at a very nearly complete design for the next economy. >
But more work is needed to define the structural considerations of the bioregional economy itself, the functioning, self-reproducing economic whole of a place: its foodshed and housing stock, its biobased materials and supply chains, its energy systems and care networks, its enterprises and the trade among them, developed as one system. This is the missing middle where all the layers described above would have to integrate. The field has written the economy’s grammar, drawn its boundaries, designed its financial organs, and seeded its schools. It has not yet formed the body.
To work towards filling that missing middle, it feels important to further articulate the discipline that would integrate these layers at the scale of the bioregional economy itself so that those of us engaged in this work and those who want to lean in but don’t know where to start can better align on shared definitions and design principles. Second, we need to work together on the design and implementation of institutions capable of seeing a bioregional economy as a living whole and of capitalizing it as a system. This first essay attempts to add to and weave with the many emerging definitions and the design specifications of bioregional economies. The second essay takes up the institutional layer. But before we can begin to describe a specification for a bioregional economy, we must first explore the design criteria required to transform our economic life at the root. Where living systems principles provide the north star for where we’re headed, understanding the current dynamics driving extraction is equally critical to ensure we transform the structure of the economy at the level where extraction first emerges. Extraction is a predictable output of two of our most foundational economic structures and their inversion provides the first design requirements any bioregional economy specification must address and include."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/an-introduction-to-bioregional-economics?)
Discussion
Rosalind Marino:
"Let me introduce the concept of Regenerative Economics (Regen). The idea is to account for all the costs and values that are missed by traditional economics. That means both social effects, and externalities like carbon emissions.
If a marsh is drained to allow for a new property development, there is a loss of habitat for important species, there is a release of stored carbon and also a loss of future carbon sequestering and oxygen producing capacity by all of the plants and algae, and then there is a loss of the recreation space which is enjoyed people who live in the area. And all of this before we account for the carbon burned by the construction of the shopping centers and roads and homes that replace the original habitat. These are material and social costs that are paid by local residents, future generations, and the ecosystem as a whole. There is also an economic benefit to the developers, investors, and community members who use the services and spaces of the new development. These benefits and costs both matter, but our current economy only has methods to account for the expenses and value of the development, forgetting the value of the marsh and costs of its loss. Sometimes environmental offsets are bought to compensate, but the specificities are largely unaccounted for. Instead, those socio-ecological losses are termed “externalities” and considered outside the system.
But, you and I both know that these losses are not external to our lives. The loss of a local wetland, or our favorite childhood hike, or the salmon runs that bring life to our local rivers all impact us and our families for generations."
(https://blog.holochain.org/regenerative-investing/)
Examples
Internet of Energy Network (IOEN)
Rosalind Marino:
"Renewable energy is the future. If our civilization has a future, we will have to shift to more sustainable methods for meeting our energy needs. That much is clear. It’s also clear that fossil fuel companies are resistant to this change, and that large solar and wind farms can only be one part of the solution. Small scale local energy production will be a large portion of the global market. Minigrids and Microgrids are emerging as solutions that are more efficient and resilient as they don’t need the massive infrastructure of energy distribution on top of the infrastructure of production. Energy is generated, stored, traded, and used locally.
The pathway to fully clean, tradable energy is not immediate. On the way to full access to clean energy, organizations including large corporations are taking seriously the responsibility to offset their production of carbon emissions. A factory produces a lot of carbon, both from the energy it uses and the industrial processes themselves. They can get their electricity from renewable sources, but depending on where a particular factory is and when they are operating, they might not have access to renewables. Renewable energy generation is subject to location, geography, and access to resources like wind, enough sunshine, and the ability to store electricity.
What if you could invest in the environment, in efforts for climate justice, in carbon markets, and systemic change? What if you could invest in a future that you and your children want to live in? But, just because they are incapable of directly using renewable energy doesn’t mean that they cannot support the use of renewables generally. Environmental Attribute Credits (EACs), including carbon credits and Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), help create incentives to invest, support, and use renewable energy.
Currently, large renewable energy farms can sell carbon credits or RECs (depending on the system used), helping corporations offset their carbon emissions. But these are economies of scale. The accounting needed to get government issuance of these carbon credits only works at large scales (a single electrical meter is a lot easier to measure and monitor than many distributed meters). IOEN is providing a way for small scale energy producers who serve their local communities to aggregate their energy production and access global renewable certificate markets.
In order to ensure auditability and to account for distributed energy production by a collection of small holders, data is needed to track energy production. IOEN’s current work with partners in Asia is helping companies and home owners provide two types of data. First, photos of their solar arrays, preferably at the time of installation. Secondly, ongoing readings from their meter, showing the energy that they feed back to their local grid. IOEN’s partners then add satellite data which is used to confirm the installation of solar panels at the sites claimed. All of this data becomes available to regulators who can cross reference each source, ensuring that the meter readings match the expected generation range for the panels.
Aggregating the data of many individual producers allows IOEN to meet the scale requirements to work with government regulators, procuring and then selling the certificates to corporations. As each individual energy producer’s contributions to this larger pool is tracked, they are able to then be compensated directly in relation to the amount of energy they produced.
Key to IOEN’s value in the market is the ability for clients to store the data (meter data, photographs etc.) in private networks hosted on Holochain which provides auditors with assurance that the certificates minted are validated and true. This creates transparency and integrity in the certificate. IOEN’s blockchain solutions that sit on top of that data then allow secondary markets to emerge, along with fractionalised investment opportunities in these renewable assets, creating liquidity. Because transactions are all tracked on the blockchain, and linked to secure data in Holochain, different organizations involved in the assets all can be paid seamlessly and transparently through fractionalised payments. Already small businesses, communities, and large corporations are seeing the value in this approach for a number of energy-related environmental assets."
(https://blog.holochain.org/regenerative-investing/)
Kwaxala - Indigenous Forest Regeneration Cooperative
Rosalind Marino:
"Kwaxala is an indigenous forest regeneration cooperative taking a different approach to nature protection that goes far beyond carbon credits.
Rather than focusing on energy production, they are concerned with the preservation and stewardship of what we already have. Remember that marsh? We agreed that it has a value. And the question is: how can we invest in that value? Kwaxala is making that a possibility.
Most land used for logging, oil drilling and fracking, and other resource extraction is government owned and often in contradiction with recognised Indigenous land rights in the area. Companies own or buy the permits and right to extract resources from that land, without buying the land itself. Kwaxala is working to buy those same rights, but rather than using them for extraction, they are securing the right to protect and regenerate the ecosystems threatened by extraction. This legal guarantee of preservation, in an area previously at genuine threat of extraction, is then used to generate carbon offsets each year which can be sold to corporations meeting their net zero commitments.
This rich dataset then provides detailed provenance for both the particular offsets generated by the protected ecosystems and for the long term investments in the ecosystems themselves so that there is detailed visibility into the health and stewardship of the ecosystem.
Kwaxala offsets not only represent sequestered carbon, but also a wider range of monetized ecoservices such as biodiversity protection and ecosystem preservation alongside positive social outcomes such as Indigenous equity and reconciliation. This enables them to command a premium market price per tonne. Additionally, by enabling capital investment directly into the organization holding the right to regenerate, they provide a new way for investment funds to flow into the asset value of the protected natural ecosystem, generating much needed upfront capital to establish these protected areas and counterbalance the extractive economic pressure to destroy the area.
But how do we ensure that the land is well taken care of? Here Kwaxala is using overlapping datasets to build a picture of the ecosystem and its health. Working with Indigenous land stewards, who are also the principal shareholders in Kwaxala itself, they are developing the metrics needed to monitor and support the wellbeing of the particular ecosystems. For some situations, that might be the water and air quality; for others, it might be the presence of indicator species; for many, it will be the conglomeration of multiple data points, collaborating to tell a story. This rich dataset then provides detailed provenance for both the particular offsets generated by the protected ecosystems and for the long term investments in the ecosystems themselves so that there is detailed visibility into the health and stewardship of the ecosystem.
To collect, manage, and maintain this data — and to share it with community members, government regulators, and investors — they are investigating the development of a distributed platform, built on Holochain. Building on Holochain in this case ensures that control of the data isn’t managed solely by the organization claiming to be protecting the ecosystem, but is rather distributed between all stakeholders. With data provenance baked in, it is also easy to track exactly what agent adds any particular piece of data. This combination of verification and distributed storage of overlapping datasets allows for a high degree of trust to be developed, and holds the organization itself accountable.
...we start to see the potential for a new regenerative economics to be developed. Based not on extraction, but rather the regenerative value of all ecosystem activities."
(https://blog.holochain.org/regenerative-investing/)
Drinchengang Regenerative Village - Bhutan
Will Ruddick and Alex Cahana:
"nning with abstract economic models, this work begins with cultural listening. It asks how Bhutan’s traditions of stewardship, mutual aid, and community responsibility might be strengthened under contemporary conditions.
Alex (Bhutan): the felt sense of a village economy - In Drinchengang, what moved me first was not a plan or a framework. It was the way people spoke about responsibility without heaviness. A path, a stream, a field edge (these are not “assets” in the abstract) they are relationships that must be tended. When elders speak about contribution, it carries both tenderness and clarity. The village economy is not only about exchange. It is about continuity. Any tool we bring must honor that (it must arrive as a guest, not as a replacement).
Within this context, the pooling of commitments can be seen as a modest coordination frame that helps communities clarify reciprocal intentions and support the rhythms of shared work.
The idea is simple in spirit. Community members already make commitments to contribute labor, tools, care, and other forms of support. What if those commitments could be expressed clearly within a shared space where they can be coordinated, witnessed, and fulfilled?
What if we could make interactions legible in a common grammar without turning relationship into a transaction?
A commitment might represent an offer to assist with irrigation maintenance, to help repair a pathway, to lend transportation, or to support a neighbor during illness. When a commitment is fulfilled, the community recognizes that contribution. When someone receives assistance, they often carry a quiet sense of responsibility to reciprocate over time, in a way that preserves dignity and relationship.
The emphasis is not on financial accounting. It is on maintaining balance within relationships. Any records, when used, are meant to function like receipts for shared memory (not tradable instruments for speculation). Where measurement is helpful, it should be collective and gentle (supporting learning about shared wellbeing rather than scoring individuals).
As described in recent discussions around commitment pooling in Bhutan, the intention is not to replace existing cultural practices but to provide a gentle coordination layer that can help communities view and repair reciprocal obligations without shame or conflict.
In this sense, the approach seeks to strengthen practices that already exist rather than introducing an entirely new economic structure."
(https://willruddick.substack.com/p/regenerative-economics-living-reciprocity)
The Book
* Book. John B. Fullerton. Regenerative Economics.
URL =
"Organization substituting for extraction and throughput, the same way it already does in every mature living system on Earth."
Discussion
John Fullerton:
"The central hypothesis of Regenerative Economics:
An economy is not a machine that can be controlled and optimized. The human economy is a living system comprised of human beings, their institutions, and the tools and technologies they create, that must be nurtured in accordance with the patterns and first principles of living systems science.
Living systems don’t grow by simply doing more, and they don’t survive by simply doing less. They do something structurally different, and it’s been measured.
This isn’t a lone insight. Two very different bodies of thought converge on it. One tradition has spent half a century proving the material ceiling is real — thermodynamics, entropy, planetary boundaries. Another, older, transdisciplinary tradition — running through physics, complexity science, philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness studies — argues reality itself is generative, not just a fixed stock waiting to be divided up. Bridging the two is a body of hard ecological science: measured evidence that living systems, as they mature, actually behave the way the second tradition predicts, without ever violating the limits the first one proved. Eugene Odum’s 1969 study of ecosystem succession is the clearest piece of that bridge.
Odum found something profound and precise: as a system matures, the ratio of raw production to standing biomass falls, even as diversity and complexity (organization) keep rising. A mature living system in the real world, not in the abstraction of simplified models, isn’t doing more with more, and it isn’t doing less with less. It’s doing more with less, because it’s gotten better organized. That’s not a hopeful metaphor. It’s measured ecological data, and it lines up with the physics of how order actually forms in nature — not by cheating entropy, but by exporting it faster than it piles up.
If that pattern holds for economies, there is an opportunity to transcend the tension between the mainstream “grow more” camp (in violation of the second law), and the ecological economics “shrink and share” camp (not particularly hopeful even if possible to imagine politically). Importantly, it is not a third position on the same spectrum. It’s a different spectrum altogether. Not more stuff. Not less stuff (although less material throughput is certainly required). A change in currency: organization substituting for extraction and throughput, the same way it already does in every mature living system on Earth. This is the profound phase shift, from one state to another."
(https://johnfullerton101.substack.com/p/the-phase-shift-ahead)
Review
Will Ruddick and Alex Cahana:
"Fullerton’s articulation of the eight principles of regenerative economics gives shape to this vision. These principles describe patterns common to healthy living systems: right relationship between human systems and the biosphere, holistic understandings of wealth, empowered participation, robust circulation of capital, respect for community and place, the creative power of diversity, adaptive governance, and balance between efficiency and resilience.
What is remarkable about this work is how many different traditions recognize themselves within it. Ecologists, indigenous leaders, cooperative movements, systems thinkers, and community organizers often read these principles and feel a sense of recognition. The language may be new, but the patterns are ancient.
In this sense, regenerative economics is not so much a new theory as it is a rediscovery.
The regenerative economics movement has given us something incredibly valuable: a shared language for describing the kind of economic systems that support life rather than undermine it.
...
First, Fullerton keeps returning to circulation. Not growth as a goal, but the health of flow, whether value is moving through communities in ways that renew people and places, or pooling upward through extraction and leakage. Second, he insists that the economy is not separate from relationship. It is nested in ecology, culture, and governance, and it can be designed to strengthen those bonds rather than erode them."
(https://willruddick.substack.com/p/regenerative-economics-living-reciprocity)
More Information
See also: Regen, the movement of supporters of Regenerative Economics in the worlds of crypto and Web3.