Regenerative Economics
Regenerative economics may be a response to the limitations of conventional growth-based economic models. Unlike traditional economics, which focuses on financial growth and assumes endless resource substitution, regenerative economics acknowledges the Earth’s ecological limits and promotes a more sustainable approach. This perspective, championed by thinkers such as Lene Rachel Andersen, Joe Brewer, Melanie Rieback, and Robin Lincoln Wood, calls for a shift from purely financial metrics to a holistic framework that integrates environmental, social, and cultural values into economic analysis. Kate Raworth’s “Donut Economics,” which emphasizes balancing economic activity with social foundations and ecological ceilings, and Hazel Henderson’s “Cake Economy,” which layers different economic structures from nature to finance, are explored too.
Over the past few months I’ve had the pleasure to meet and work with an assortment of authors, teachers, and thought leaders who exemplify a generalized economic perspective I will call “regenerative”. Whereas conventional economics focuses on growth, assuming one sort of material input might always be substituted for another, regenerative economics considers the possibility of additional constraints to growth imposed by the total biological carrying capacity of the Earth. From a regenerative perspective, economic productivity, as measured by Gross National Product, has consumed too many of the natural resources upon which it depends, such that serious doubts must now arise that current trends are not long-term sustainable. Maybe not even short- or medium-term sustainable. Emerging bodies of theory on the metacrisis or the polycrisis or various forms of potential collapse due to climate change mark the mood of the moment. However, although the theorists mentioned here are informed by such theories of potential collapse or crisis on global scales, they all in different ways offer pathways to optimism, to hope, to — regeneration. All of them are post-postmodern in the sense that critique and deconstruction are not enough. They share a common perspective that to find a way forward, society must not just deconstruct, it must also reconstruct.
The theorists featured here — Lene Rachel Andersen, Joe Brewer, Melanie Rieback, Robin Lincoln Wood — differ in focus and in details from one another, but they all take critical views of the sort of economics taught in introductory courses the world over. Supply and demand. Price and money. Income and expense. The quantitative analysis of economic activity with all transactions being denominated in financial terms. These authors all want to get beyond that. But beyond how? Having read, conversed with, and reflected upon the teachings of these different thinkers, although they each have their own voices, priorities, and perspectives, I perceive between all of them a common emphasis on contextualization. Namely, the economics of supply and demand and purely financial metrics is far too narrow. In various directions, each of the authors treated here widen economic analysis to encompass more than just money and finance. In its ultimate extension, such contextualization leads to holism, the positioning of economics within wider fields of biology, society, culture, and even cosmology. For these authors, the question of price is secondary to the question of values. Regenerative economics transvalues financial values into environmental and socially supportive values. Money either works — or does not work — for such regenerative economics precisely in so far as it contributes to the maximization of holistic, not just financial, values.
My goal in this essay is to lay down groundwork for readers interested in regenerative economics, but not quite sure how to grasp the sorts of comprehensive, holistic, transdisciplinary conceptual frameworks typically featured by these regenerative authors. Each of these authors has multiple graduate degrees or practical experience teaching and working in thoroughly transdisciplinary settings. To unpack all of their works in a conventional disciplinary manner would require something like a quadruple major in business, economics, complexity theory, and evolutionary biology. If everyone had to learn regenerative economics that way, no one could ever begin to practice it, because either lifespan, mental energy, or tuition dollars would give out first! As luck would have it, my random walk of a career path has indeed resulted in a literal quadruple major, one component discipline of which is education. My teaching specialty is making complicated matters sound simple. That is what is on offer here.
Regenerative economics adds layer upon layer of complexity to conventional economics, and truth be told, conventional economics on its own terms is more than complex enough. At the risk of oversimplification, in what follows points of entry will be offered, ideally allowing readers to engage with the source material and to feel confident that regenerative economics offers practical guidance for constructive action in a world that seems both out of control and beyond human comprehension. There is no easy obvious pathway to navigating global crisis scenarios, but there are potential contributions for each of us to make. I believe the study of regenerative economics will assist readers in navigating difficult decisions in these very uncertain times.
Donut Economics
Several of the authors discussed here cite Kate Raworth’s Donut Economics. Let’s start with that model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut_(economic_model)
Notice this is a very contextualized economic model — far more than supply and demand are featured in Donut Economics. Let’s begin with the middle ring, the green ring, the one labeled “Regenerative and Distributed Economy”. The main message here is that the economy, as such, is more good than evil. Humans need economic goods to survive. Food, clothing, and shelter usually top that list of survival requirements, but feel free to define economic essentials any way you like. The point here is simply that some sort of economic activity will be a human requirement going forward. Whatever benefit there may be to the plants and the animals by eliminating all the humans, that’s not a plan that I especially favor and none of the authors referenced here favor it either. We would all like to adjust human economic activity in ways beneficial to plant, animal, and even microbial life on Earth, but not to the exclusion of humans and not through the elimination of economic activity as such.
Next, take a look at the inner ring, the one labeled “Social Foundation”. Some might disagree with Raworth about desired policy details on topics like gender equality or peace and justice or other items she considers social foundational. Is a very particular approach to social activism required to practice regenerative economics? Perhaps, but my personal preference is to avoid distractions in the direction of partisan politics or anything resembling culture wars. It’s not that regenerative economics has no political implications — far from that! It’s rather that the core values frameworks articulated by regenerative economics run much deeper than issues debated in short term election cycles. The changes needed for regenerative economics amount to an epochal shift in the direction of human civilization. Discussion about the details of what that shift specifically entails can be worked out in good time — assuming society has multiple centuries in front of it to do the working out. For current purposes, I’m simply hoping we all can agree that economic activity as such rests upon a social foundation, what some of our authors call “human capital”.
Finally, in the outer ring, we find the “Ecological Ceiling”. That’s really the most recent new dimension that informs Kate Raworth as well as our other authors. From the dawn of humanity down through fairly recently, human economic thinking assumed there was always more nature out there to just go get. Over the past half century or so, it has occurred to a growing number of analysts however that resource depletion on Earth is a real threat. In her open-source curriculum on Post Growth Entrepreneurship, for example, Melanie Rieback discusses the seminal work of the Club of Rome in its 1972 report, “The Limits to Growth”. Then she offers a list of other authors who either preceded or followed the Limits to Growth report, providing additional support for such views.
· 19th century anti-industrialists
· Décroissance: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and André Gorz (1972) + Serge Latouche
· E. F. Schumacher — Small Is Beautiful (1973)
· Jason Hickel
· Douglas Rushkoff
· Charles Eisenstein
· Mariana Mazzucato
· David Graeber
· Christian Felber
· Wellbeing Economy Alliance
· Institute for New Economic Thinking
Time and space will not allow us to delve into all this limits-to-growth literature, but anyone who has followed recent environmentalism will surely be aware of it. There really is not much question that environmentalists are suspicious of “growth”. The deeper problem is that our current political and economic systems depend entirely on growth in material and economic terms to avoid their own sorts of collapses. No-growth or degrowth politics has limited traction in democracies and non-democracies alike. Climate denial is still an active political program. If the outer ring — “Ecological Ceiling” — is just a post-truth talking point for pundits on social media, it can easily be counteracted by such contrary points of view. But floods, wildfires, heatwaves, droughts, and crop failures don’t care much about political opinions.
The idea of an ecological ceiling reflects what macrohistorian Ian Morris calls “hard limits” that have collapsed empires and civilizations time and time again. Over the centuries, when climate changes and crops fail, masses of people starve. That’s Morris’s data-driven conclusion, and Morris is just one historian among many to notice this rather obvious pattern. All that has changed lately is we have run out of new frontiers to exploit. If anything, this closing of the geographical circle on Earth makes any impending hard limits harder than ever. No new continents left to discover, colonize, and exploit. We will need to somehow manage for now with the only planet we all have and share.
The Ecological Ceiling on Raworth’s outer ring divides into nine separate categories that are known collectively as the “planetary boundaries.” The planetary boundaries model was developed by a team including Johan Rockström in 2009. The model has been tested and refined ever since. The idea behind planetary boundaries is to define in a measurable way Morris’s and others’ more generalized notion of hard limits. Anyone who studies history knows of croplands returned to desert and forests shrunk to scrub. That nature can be overstressed by human activity should not be controversial. But how to measure such stress? That is the question animating the planetary boundaries project. The nine current categories are the results of considerable statistical testing and analysis. There are on-going attempts to reduce the number of categories or to add more. So far, such changes do not significantly improve the explanatory power of these nine. Again, let’s not get bogged down in details. If you want to toss out one of these boundary categories or add a couple more of your own choosing, it really will not affect the larger discussion. The essential jumping off point for Regenerative Economics is that planetary boundaries are real enough, and human economics needs to take them into account. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
Social Foundations — The Bildung Rose
Lene Rachel Andersen heads the Global Bildung movement. Bildung is fundamentally an educational philosophy, and thus to explore it in any great detail here would distract from our central focus on Regenerative Economics. However, bildung — or in any case some effective approach or another to educational design — is vital to any solutions-oriented approach to Raworth’s donut model. “Education” is one of the inner tabs on Raworth’s donut diagram. Moreover, it’s hard to image other social foundations — from the material to the ethical — being implemented without educational programs to coach people in how to cross-connect disciplinary knowledge in social foundational ways. Bildung excels at that sort of cross-connection. Consider this diagram called the “Bildung Rose”.
The Bildung Rose models a holistic education program, conducted in community settings, encouraging students to explore multiple disciplines in a well-rounded and socially constructive way. I visualize the Bildung Rose as a sort of educational reactor core exerting lines of pro social energy outward in support of Raworth’s social foundation layer for donut economics.
Cake Economics — More Than Just Money
Hazel Henderson’s “Cake Economy” is another form of economic contextualization.
Classic economic theory is mainly interested in market transactions denominated in currency. This represents the growth of the monetary exchange economy during the Modern Era in the West, and due to Western influence around the world, more recently for the global economy as a whole. However, anthropologists and historians are well aware of many traditional societies based on systems other than monetary exchange. Even in our current societies, all sorts of economic value is not captured through financial accounting. What Henderson calls the “Love Economy”, for example the sorts of services that typically women provide around the house for little or no financial compensation, would cost a vast fortune if all these services needed to be hired on the open market. Also, in another non-monetary layer of the “cake”, Henderson rightly points out that we all rely on Mother Nature. Planetary boundary overshoot is problematic precisely because it threatens the Mother Nature foundation layer of our economic “cake”.
If classical economics takes both Mother Nature and human motherhood for granted, there still remains the question of how a more holistically informed view would work in practice. Conceding that price action in the global marketplace is a narrow measure, how might we conveniently replace it with some more comprehensive metric? Different regenerative authors will treat this question differently. Some see money itself as a root problem. Others focus on profits. Some are more comfortable than others with terms like capital, business, enterprise, entrepreneurship, finance, investment, and even growth. Regenerative Economics is a relatively new field. The standard vocabulary and conceptual apparatus have not been fully worked out. Nevertheless, it does appear possible to find some big-picture consistency among the four authors discussed here, along with others they cite, along with many others beyond these who also share what I am calling regenerative sensibilities. From that big-picture consistency, I hope to point readers in the direction of economic activities that should hold up to critical scrutiny, even under the many crisis-informed frameworks currently in circulation.
Polymodern Economics
In her recent essay on Polymodern Economics, Lene Rachel Andersen cites Hazel Henderson’s Cake Economy and develops her own “Cake Economy”. It is a multi-layered economy of different economic structures: nature, indigenous gift economy, traditional artisan market economy, modern industrialized capitalist economy, and postmodern globalized digital economy. The five need to work together.
Multicapitalism
Capital and capitalism are trigger words. Say anything nice on social media about Karl Marx or Das Kaptial and prepare to be cancelled by about half the readership. Say anything nice about business, finance, or investment and prepare to be cancelled by the other half. Man on Wire had more to stand upon than anyone trying to articulate a balanced view of the role of capital in our current environmentally-overshooting, globalizing economy. Nevertheless, like Man on Wire, one foot before the other! Carefully.
I find it helpful to paraphrase a bit and to switch out the word “capital” with something more neutral like “wealth”. That’s really what capital is — wealth. To get to something like “capitalism”, identify wealth deployed for the creation of future wealth. That brings us to savings, investment, accumulation, and other business-related terms. Capitalism in its many forms consistently holds off on current consumption in the interest of growing larger stocks of wealth for future consumption.
If there is always some surplus left after consumption, and if that surplus is always reinvested — and assuming no hard limits — basic math dictates perpetual exponential growth. Sounds too good to be true? Then you likely are not believing the no hard limits assumption. With hard limits (and no adjustments), it’s exponential growth, until some wall gets hit, and then the pain. Jared Diamond and many other authors have chronicled what the wall-hitting process looked like in many previous civilizations. As civilizational historian Carroll Quigley puts it, every prior civilization had an “instrument of expansion”. But most of those civilizations are now defunct. Something went wrong somehow. Unless hard limits are a complete illusion and unless we can keep doing things like drilling and burning fossil fuels from now until forever, some likely day of reckoning — or a major turning point at least — lies before us.
For reasons such as these, many regenerative authors prefer the idea of no growth or post growth. Melanie Rieback, for example, calls her curriculum “post growth entrepreneurship”. That’s one way to respect planetary boundaries and hard limits. It may not be the only way, however.
Under the theory of multicapitalism, treated extensively in many books, articles, and presentations by Robin Lincoln Wood, there are certain sorts of capital we really should be growing. Natural capital for example. Natural capital is Mother Nature in Hazel Henderson’s cake. It’s also what we are chewing up through environmental overshoot.
One of the key insights of the regenerative movement is that nature itself can be nurtured. Through permaculture, for example, farming can actually increase topsoil depth. Water tables can be recharged. Species diversity on farmland can increase through appropriate planting and crop rotations. Similarly, forests and wetlands can be restored. Coral reefs reseeded. Aboriginal peoples did not just forage from given landscapes. They selectively planted, burned, and rearranged their territories to optimize nature’s productivity. Growth, influenced by symbiotic human activity, really is nature’s way. To restore planetary carrying capacity, either nature unaided must grow back (by humans getting out of the way), or else we need to work with nature — to grow more nature. “Post growth” as a critique of recent financial excesses is an appealing notion. But if we focus more on natural capital and not so much on financial capital, “pro growth” can also be a regenerative idea.
Bioregionalism
Joe Brewer’s program of bioregional regeneration is pro growth in this natural capital sense. Brewer sets out to restore entire landscapes through the application of human labor and capital, deployed strategically to build back the carrying capacity of the land. Brewer’s initial demonstration project in Barichara, Colombia involves reforestation, water management, and educational programs for local children. Community participation is central to this model. What Brewer calls “bioregional funding ecosystems” involve interlocking non-profit organizations, each headed by a different mix of community members. In the theory of multicapital, Robin Lincoln Wood identifies an assortment of “Anthro” capitals — social capital, intellectual capital, relationship capital, human capital — each of which is potentially wealth-generating. Joe Brewer’s bioregional regeneration model leverages all these “Anthro” capitals. Brewer accepts financial donations from international donors for the Barichara project, but carefully channels that finance into targeted funding pools manageable by local people. The upshot of this is growth of human capacity alongside natural capacity. So to sum up, it’s growth. It’s regenerative growth.
Revisiting Hazel Henderson’s cake economy model, Brewer and his team are using the upper layers of the cake (finance) to grow the lower layers (love and nature). This is the opposite of colonial extractive capitalism — a legacy in Colombia as in much of the world — in which lower layers of love and nature were cannibalized to generate international finance. The Barichara project is in effect decolonizing by reversing the polarity of classic economic flows. This sort of investment realignment is key to understanding regenerative economics.
Pockets of the Future in the Present
Robin Lincoln Wood presents a rich and elaborate regenerative business model, informed by his decades of experience in international finance, consulting, law, entrepreneurship and many other fields. It’s all too much to summarize briefly here. But one of Wood’s ideas jumped out at me as perhaps the ideal point of entry to both his work and the works of many other related authors. That idea is “pockets of the future in the present”.
Think of a pocket of the future in the present as a small demonstration model, constructed from whatever is currently at hand, but potentially replicable, scalable, and capable of wide adoption when circumstances change. Wood’s current initiative is called “Regenovation”, short for “regenerative innovation”. The idea is to build something new, to replace the old system, when the old system reaches end of life. Planetary boundary overshoot — as in hard limits — spells impending end of life for many current industrial age technologies. We can either just hit that wall and muddle through when the crisis arrives. Or we can see around corners in entrepreneurial fashion and start building a more thriveable and sustainable future now.
Melanie Rieback’s post growth entrepreneurship is literally a curriculum in how to build such a future through regenerative entrepreneurship. Melanie has launched her own non-profit organization — with a head count of 50 — in the unlikely discipline of ethical hacking. Melanie’s point is that regenerative economics is not just about bio-disciplines. It can also work in financial and technical sectors, as long as we kick the habit of maximizing only financial returns. Melanie’s formula is to aim for middle class salaries and pensions, and to otherwise leave all profits in the business. Although she calls this model “post” growth, from another point of view, it can also be seen as “pro” growth. She is just setting out to seed and grow balanced sustainable business models, not instruments of expansion for would-be empire builders. Melanie’s non-profit cyber security firm and the many other such organizations she has incubated thus exemplify what Robin Lincoln Wood calls pockets of the future in the present.
Now What?
Do you like the idea of Regenerative Economics? But are you wondering how to put it all into practice? You can of course study more. References are provided below. As time allows, I strongly encourage you to examine original works by all the authors mentioned here. But at some point, we all need to get our heads out of the books and get busy in the world around us. Facing something on the order of thousands of consumer and professional decisions every day of our lives, how can we reorient our actions to be more regenerative? To answer such questions completely will need more time and space than this essay format provides, but I’m going to make at least a modest attempt. (Remember — simplifying complexity is what I do). So to act more regeneratively, consider how a given process fits these tentative guidelines …
· Is it caring for Mother Earth?
· Is it moving in a better direction on one or more of the planetary boundaries?
· Is it valuing motherhood?
· Is it building up social capacity for regenerative economics?
· Is it using money to grow nature and people, not using nature and people to grow money?
· Can you do it now with what you have already?
· Could you spread it around wider if it works out well?
· Will it still work well, even after society crashes into one or more hard limits?
· Is what you consider valuable truly a reflection of values as such?
· Can you turn finance into both natural and human capitals?
· Will the world look better tomorrow because of your actions today?
If you can say “yes” to questions such as these, then in all likelihood your business practice is regenerative. I tend to agree with the metacrisis theorists that collapse is all around us, or in any case, just a matter of time. But collapse of the old system is not so bad if a new and better system is already proven and ready to go. One advantage to Regenerative Economics is that it can be practiced right now in pockets of the future in the present. Just take stock of where you are and figure out how to build a pocket of the future in the present in that exact place. No good materials handy? Just remember, it all starts with imagination …
References
Regenerative Economics
Lene Rachel Andersen (2024). “Polymodern Economics”. Medium. Retrieved from https://lenerachelandersen.medium.com/polymodern-economics-ec4d817b3824#
Lene Rachel Andersen (2023). Polymodernity. Nordic Bildung.
Joe Brewer (2021). The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth. TCP Press.
Jenny Cameron & Katherine Gibson (2003). “Feminising the Economy: metaphors, strategies, politics. In Gender Place and Culture A Journal of Feminist Geography 10(2)
Kate Raworth (2018). Doughnut Economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist. Chelsea Green.
Melanie Rieback (2023). “Post Growth Entrepreneurship”. Retrieved from https://nonprofit.ventures/
Robin Lincoln Wood (2009). The Great Shift: Catalyzing the second Renaissance. Troutdale, OR.
Robin Lincoln Wood (2015). A Leader’s Guide to ThriveAbility: A multi-capital operating system for regenerative inclusive economy. AuthorHouse.
Robin Lincoln Wood (2017). Making Good Happen: Pathways to the thriving future. Troutdale, OR.
Robin Lincoln Wood (2018). The Momentous Leap: Thriveable transformation in the 21st century. Troutdale, OR.
Robin Lincoln Wood (2017). Synergize! 21st century leadership. Troutdale, OR.
Additional Context
The Bildung Rose. Retrieved August 16, 2024 from: https://www.nordicbildung.org/the-bildung-rose/
Jared Diamond (2011 ). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed: revised edition. Penguin Books.
Ian Morris (2010). Why the West Rules — for Now. Picador.
Planetary Boundaries. Retrieved August 12. 2024 from: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
Carrroll Quigley (1972). “General Crises in Civilizations”. Paper for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 139th Meeting, Washington, D.C.
