Financing Regeneration at Bioregional scales

Introduction

Late last year I completed a research project for the South Devon Bioregion, likely to become the first UK bioregion to set up its own financing facility to fund regenerative work. By way of preparation, the team at Bioregional Learning Centre (BLC) were curious to find out about financing facilities elsewhere across the world that were supporting the building of capacity for regenerative work at local scales. Below I summarise the findings .

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The architect and veteran regenerative practitioner Bill Reed once quipped about the scale at which we should think about our regenerative work. “We might not be able to save the planet”, he said, “but perhaps we can save our places, one at a time.” Our imperilled ecological processes are of course woven together at local scales, and at that level it is easier to relate to and care for them. Connecting to our landscapes and life’s diversity around us, clearly comprises a part of our identity. We encounter it regularly in our rivers, plants, wildlife, our soils, the air we breathe in common. This care for locale goes for ruptures in our social fabric too. So, how to participate in lifting our places to an end state, a state from which they have the capacity to healthily regenerate and evolve themselves? And how are people across localities already working to direct financial resources in this direction?

The questions we asked

We were interested if finance and funding was conscious of this notion of end states. We were curious about the sources of finance: did care for places translate into local people investing in them? Scale too: was investment flowing at a level that could be transformative? And learning. Did resources also address climate adaptation, and the capacity to learn how to continue to adapt. And finally, governance. Who was in control, and where was any resulting wealth ending up?

Investors next door

We started from the hypothesis that there is financial wealth in any community for this work. This brought us quickly into contact with the local investment clubs springing up across the United States, brought to prominence by the local investment champion Michael Schuman.

One example. Pioneer Valley Grows  in western Massachusetts is a community Investment fund set up within the local County Community Development Corporation (CCDC). The CCDC provides due diligence and financing. Local resident investors are drawn by the potential for a local, and viable food system. Together they have created a pool of ‘social impact notes’ returning 0-2% per annum, with loan amounts ranging from $1,000 to $250,000 for all types of local farm and food businesses. Other U.S. clubs work at an even smaller scale where investors and investees meet regularly face to face in their communities. Members of these clubs report that they value the meaningful relationships – the social capital – that grow through creating these networks. Examples abound in the Main Street Journal.

Over here in the UK, a more remote approach relationally speaking, yet still effective, is local crowdfunding. An example. Crowdfunder Foundation, the charitable arm of the UK's leading crowdfunding platform supports the Sussex Bay project which plans to generate a £50million fund by 2050, and engage 1 million people to restore nature to thriving along 100 miles of Sussex coastline. Each crowdfunded donation receives a live match from the matching pool that doubles the donation in real time. This appears to incentivise participation, boost visibility of the project, and tends to increase the size of the pot.

While both these approaches mobilise money, the capacity for learning to adapt to a changing world is effectively privatised – within a business, or within a project team – if it is thought about at all. The belief at BLC, on the contrary, is that growing this capacity needs to be a broad- based public endeavour, a community-wide engagement and commitment, unique to each bioregion and its story.

Funding as acupuncture

In South Devon, the Bioregional Learning Centre has been asked to commit the next 18 months to taking a lead role in moving the region towards climate adaptation, in partnership with local bodies across all sectors voluntary, community and public. The plan is to build on the outcomes of a ‘Learning Journey for Climate Adaptation’ led by BLC in June 2024 which explored with farmers, communities, town councils, and all those already innovating (in agriculture, horticulture, energy, health and social care) how to adapt to what BLC are calling the Long Emergency. To understand what is needed to grow future resilience over time. This Journey demonstrated even more clearly the need for funding mechanisms to think in ‘wholes’; to address interconnections rather than single ‘controllable’ projects. To see in other words, the entire interconnected landscape as dynamic, interacting, on the move. And to ask where best, at what points where energies cluster the most should funding focus, like acupuncture, to lift the vitality, viability and capacity of the whole bioregion to evolve?

With this dynamic picture, and the limitations of the two approaches above in mind, we sought inspiration closer to home. We found it in our own UK bioregioning community, in one of our sister initiatives Bioregioning Tayside, in Scotland.

Scotland, famous for its once salmon-rich rivers has launched the Riverwoods Blueprint Project, led by the Scottish Wildlife Trust with an ambition to regenerate riparian habitats. Salmon struggle in water temperatures above 20°C, and adults can't leap falls when the water is above 23°C. Shade from trees helps keep rivers cool. As a keystone species, salmon returning to the rivers – given their numbers are in steep decline – would be a clear indicator of recovery to health of the whole watershed. The Riverwoods project on Tayside, is on the River Ericht one of the most important spawning grounds for Atlantic salmon in Europe. This is a 30-40 year community-led project, designed together with the specialist social impact investors Palladium who were guided by a community wealth-building approach. The Tayside community’s ambition, a decision that local landowners and the broader community reached together, is that the community development anchor organisation should not only govern the project, but over time, learn the necessary project skills to run it for themselves.

The scale of the work, and the intention for there to be benefits both to landowners and to the wider  community means there is a need to unlock private finance, and not rely solely on the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Esmee Fairburn Foundation, the main grant funders behind Riverwoods.

Attention has therefore turned to the filling the gap with high integrity carbon credits through broadleaf tree planting that offer co-benefits: additional biodiversity uplift, water quality improvements, and of course the social returns. Palladium which has led the way on baseline assessment and financial modelling, is approaching philanthropists and corporate investors. One challenge in this case is that these credits, because they deliver widely for the community, are relatively expensive. We wait to see how this develops. Meanwhile, our Tayside colleagues also champion ‘community science’ as an approach to growing adaptive capacity. The community can choose whether or not to engage with scientific experts - who lead the more commonly known ‘citizen science’. It is characterised by self-organised learning. Governance of learning in other words, belongs to the community.

We found a number of elegant aikido moves like the Tayside one in our research – using the momentum of the existing system (like the appetite for carbon, biodiversity credits, ESG ratings) – to achieve more radical ends. For example, like creating a for-profit company (Highlands Rewilding) which has a board that has credibility with and is investable by, financial institutions. And which buys tracts of land in order to turn them over to community ownership, leasing the land back to manage it for nature recovery and natural capital monetisation. The proceeds are then shared between itself and the community trust that owns the land explicitly and in perpetuity for regenerative ends.

But until we encountered the Deshkan Ziibi Conservation Impact Bond, we hadn’t come across an approach that was truly transforming of the existing system, and that challenged the worldviews of all its partners. This Bond is designed to reverse the trend of habitat loss and to accelerate the growth and long-term stewardship of healthy landscapes on the shores of Lake Erie, in the so-called Carolinian Zone. It is Canada’s southernmost bioregion.

Transforming value return

The Carolinian Zone is home to many Indigenous Nations, some of the country’s most diverse flora and fauna, and approximately 25% of Canada’s human population. The design of the Bond was profoundly influenced by the worldview of the first Nation Deshkan Ziibiing edbendaagzijig  (“those that belong to Antler River”). They brought a fundamental imperative to the Bond’s design: that we must restore our relationships with the land in order for conservation to have long-term success. This perspective also stipulated that human benefit should be taken out of the centre of the Bond’s thinking. That humans be recognised as only one piece in nature’s interconnected web.

The Deshkan Ziibi leadership team comprised not only First Peoples, but also the local Ivey business school (as evaluators), growers and ecologists, as well as local impact investors Verge Capital and the main conservation body Carolinian Canada. On the face of it, a somewhat conventional grouping. But what was radical and therefore inspirational, was the principle the team agreed upon: that building the capacity for adaptation is fundamentally about creating, strengthening, and learning, about relationship.

The leadership team agreed 5 relational outcomes for the Bond:

1. Connecting Healthy Habitats

2. Connecting Knowledge/Circling and Learning;

3. Connecting Opportunities,

4. Connecting our Hearts and Minds

5. Connecting our Bodies.

What also piqued our interest in relation to the South Devon context, because it addresses the vision for for the bioregion to generate and retain more of its income, was the thinking behind Outcome 3: Connecting Opportunities.

Carolinian Canada told us that the relationships they facilitated across the community through the Bond enabled them to kick start a market for native plant garden centres through encouraging landowners to plant native plants on their land, and through community planting events. Carolinian Canada pointed to the clarity of the science: that restoring native plants is the most effective precondition for rebuilding the region’s biodiversity. They also knew that that the greenhouse, floriculture, and nursery markets in Ontario are worth 13% of primary agriculture market. So, it also made economic sense. But Outcome 3 speaks directly to adaptation too. Local planting of seed orchards allows the community to participate in the process of continually updating a region-wide seed bank, based on which local native plant varieties prove most capable to adapting to changes in climate. 

Relating between paradigms

Samantha Power and Leon Seefeld’s book Bioregional Financing Facilities published last year, also sets great store by relationships. Their interest is in how a commitment to building deep relationships and collective deliberation can surface strong and diverse projects and integrate them into investable bundles across a bioregion, eg. in regenerative agriculture, watershed restoration, community-led renewable energy and so on. So that you get mutually reinforcing benefits across all dimensions of the transition to a regenerative economy. But also, how in their structuring, these financing facilities can empower local people directly to make allocation decisions.

The working hypothesis sitting behind this is that these bioregional financing facilities will act as some kind of ‘connective tissue’ between the paradigm of conventional financial institutions and this less conventional, but vital work.

However, the sense we have from our research is that even if it is possible to grow it, this connective tissue will require more intensive relationship building than we may be accounting for. Particularly if its primary intent is to mobilise money. Here’s one UK example. The pioneering Wyre Catchment Natural Flood Management Project  brought together insurance companies, impact investors, government, NGO’s and a bank, and addressed just one principal adaptation issue in the catchment, as the name suggests.

Yet this multi-stakeholder project over 70 hectares which comprised woodland creation, leaky dams, ponds and scrapes, and new hedgerows, required an ‘adaptive management phase’ of five years - to allow the interventions to be altered according to how they performed. But for all the government money and impact finance required, four high-net-worth individuals were still needed, introduced to the project by Triodos Bank, the institution that structured the commercial loan. Imagine the complexities of bundling on top of flooding, cross-bioregional projects in community energy and regenerative agriculture.

Consider again the contrast with the Deshkan Ziibi example. In their case, the primacy of relationship-building – with all forms of life and for its own sake – rather than primarily for their utility, seems to be delivering both complex, and synergistic outcomes.

Funding and governance in decentralised spaces

We are aware of a great deal of activity in the decentralised virtual space, in what’s known as web 3.0 along with the use of blockchain to verify carbon and other credits and cryptocurrencies as a means of distributing funding. One initiative is Gitcoin which uses a quadratic funding algorithm so that a project funding pot will always award greater match-funding to projects with broader bases of support.

However, closer to the interest of this research – in relationship weaving – is another virtual initiative called Vivero, an app-enabled community-directed trust for participatory giving and grant making. Community members contribute financially monthly or through one-time gifts. Importantly, non-financial contributions are also recognized. The community collectively nominates and decides which regenerative projects and initiatives the pooled funds will support. Having joined a number of their meetings to explore this, I can testify to Vivero’s commitment to grow a trusting and vibrant community that encourages a growing consciousness around ‘needs’, both personal and project needs, and that the answer to our needs is not always financial support, or in any case financial support from conventional sources.

Nature as an asset class

Throughout the research we have also wondered is it possible in the search for return on investment to escape the financialising of nature? And, as Leon Seefeld points out in addition, the risks therein of further commodification, privatisation, and centralisation of natural assets and wealth. Which, we might argue, inevitably follow if we place human benefit at the centre, reduce nature to its services, and call on the existing financial architecture.

But if we cannot escape this reality for now, then how best to embrace it?

In the Deshkan Ziibi Bond case, the leadership team drew on their ‘story of place’ to address this tension. The two fundamentally different worldviews, those of the European settlers from the 17thcentury onwards, and those of the First Nations whose land they colonised were reconciled at the time into an approach that became known as ‘two-eyed seeing’. For the Bond therefore, Deshkan Ziibi agreed to embrace both Western and Indigenous eyes within the Bond’s metrics, agreeing on one measure from whichever paradigm described a particular concept more holistically.  Thus, five pay-for-performance relational metrics below were linked to the 5 outcomes.

Note the learning metric at no. 2.

1.     The number of Hectares enhanced.

2.     The number of people engaged with learning about the land

3.     The number of intercultural and cross-sectoral economic opportunities generated]

4.     Stories told of Nature connectedness

5.     The quantity and quality of ecocentric sightings

The uplift in carbon sequestration and biodiversity were side benefits of this holistic approach. However, they were a necessary component for enabling the Bond to work for so-called ‘outcome payers’: corporations and government, who capitalised the Bond. But it was how, the social process by which they arrived at their metrics, that they acknowledged was key. It was in tune with their context and their story.

This was true for all the examples we studied that were able to sustain their impact over time.

In the case of Common Land, the successful Dutch public benefit organisation with a vision to regenerate large landscapes (50K acres or more), the social process they embarked on initially before any intervention, was to conduct in-depth research with local farmers across a range of degraded landscapes. The farmers described a pattern of losses: a loss of meaning and pride; a loss of community and jobs; a loss of biodiversity; and a loss of investment capital. Common Land turned these around into 4 key and generic returns that they and their landscape partners now use to measure the impact of their restorative work.  But the potency of these generic measures and the way they are made specific to each context has led to Commonland’s success for over a decade. 

But are these returns granular or responsive enough to support changes of emphasis, or direction given the sheer pace of change in the external environment? Do they invite local actors and local institutions to find, and keep evolving their unique value-adding roles in enabling nature to find stability. And even integrate new energies generated say by climate change, to move landscapes towards higher orders of expression? Will the one-eye of conventional investors be satisfied with ‘simple’ metrics of impact?

In designing our own metrics we have an additional question: can we arrive at metrics which by their nature build the resources, capability, and will to continue evolving over time? We will be mindful of the teachings of the Deshkan Ziibi Bond as we do our own ‘two-eyed’ seeing. We will be holding in mind at least three frameworks in designing the most effective indicators to guide funding for interventions at the acupuncture points in the South Devon Bioregion.  One of these frameworks, the multi-capital framework is discussed in this paper by Josie Plaut, Bill Reed and Jim Newman. It offers useful catalysing questions that could get projects to achieve multi-capital outcomes. At another level of rigour, Regenesis offer two more frameworks both building on the work of Charlie Krone. The first distils a set of six critical success factors that enable living systems to support the evolution of life. The first three deal with the outer landscape of a place – the material structuring needed for life’s processes. And because we humans cannot be separated out from any living system, the next three address the inner developmental landscape. The third framework we’re drawn to is one that Krone called the ‘Four Levels of Work’. It presents us with a live and dynamic picture of the workings of any living system, like a watershed, that has the capacity to sustain its vitality, viability and its capacity to evolve. It begs the question of relevant indicators at each level, reminding us that we have a role of adding value, rather than one of ‘fixing’.

Regenerative Business and the Doughnut

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Towards useful metrics in Bioregions

Bioregion: the word already takes you to new places

As we evolve our role from an ecoliteracy and outdoor activities centre focused principally on school residentials to serving a wider local community, we’re thinking more about this term ‘bioregion’.

The local Council is thinking about it too. We’re fortunate to have a local Council whose leaders are right alongside us. In fact, we see each other as partners in moving towards a distributive and regenerative local economy, and thriving community. Almost certainly they will be looking for useful measures of progress.

First, how should we make the most of this idea of ‘bioregions’ which is capturing the imagination of communities worldwide from the Grampian Highlands of Scotland to the olive growing regions of the Mediterranean, from the Columbian Andes to the Pacific Northwest? Can it make a material difference to people’s lives, can it move us towards this new economy, and if so how are we and the other organisations and communities of the Forest to work together differently?

 In the early 1970’s when inspired organic farmers in California first came up with the notion of the bioregion, they defined it as:

A distinct area with coherent plant and animal communities, and natural systems, often defined by a watershed. A bioregion is a whole ‘life-place’ with unique requirements for human inhabitation so that it will not be disrupted or injured.

Peter Berg, Planet Drum Foundation 1973

Then it had more than a touch of conservation about it: wanting to reconnect with and conserve the ways indigenous peoples had been caring and stewarding the landscape over millennia.

Today, for those of us more distant in time from the ancient peoples of our lands, faced with mounting inequalities and ecological degradation, the idea is if anything, more compelling. The word carries the potency to heal the separation of ‘bio’ nature, and human ‘region’; it brings them once again into a complete whole. It reminds us how successfully modernity has rendered the ‘bio’ a mute backdrop to our human drama; it reminds us we are all equal in the face of natural disaster.

In a society fixated with utility, where we speak of ecosystem services, carbon credits, biodiversity net gain, the ‘bioregion’ can connect us again to our deepest emotional needs and affirm nature’s place in the realm of the human spirit.  We need the experience of awe in the every-day, not only in the exceptional, as GK Chesterton once wisely said. We yearn to root ourselves, to feel our sense of belonging to where we live, to the land we walk on, however recently we have arrived. And even to find our place in the on-going story of our place.

If the promise is once again to inhabit a vibrant, living, responsive world which has its own ways of speaking if only we could slow down to listen;  if re-enchanting the places where we live is a way to reconcile ourselves to the inevitable upheavals of climate change; if supporting each other as well as nature is the path to survive and thrive through these times, then how must we be?

Our role must surely be to ask these kinds of questions.

Of Nouns and Verbs

One way of being we will need to challenge is that which fixes us on a world we can control, on targets that we ‘drive’ towards. Nature has no targets, it has no goal, and as the celebrated Chinese text the Tao Te Ching says: nature never rushes, yet everything gets done. Our language betrays our thinking. We use nouns to describe our world: house, community, car, job. Nouns we can manipulate, improve, change yet they are as dead as butterflies pinned behind glass cabinets, absent their living context. The risk is that the bioregion remains just another noun. While the term describes a ‘life place’, many who advocate for bioregional thinking prefer ‘bioregioning’ – the verb, to remind us that the work is alive, unfolding and unpredictable, without a determinate destination. Like the work with our thistles.

Interestingly, many indigenous languages are more verb than noun-based, highlighting relationships and the interconnectedness of life. It’s claimed that speakers of Mikmáq, a First Nation language of Canada's Atlantic Provinces can speak all day without using a single noun.

Politics, Power & Legal Rights for Nature

Before we dive a little deeper into the ‘being’ question it’s worth reminding ourselves of a huge bear trap bioregional thinking could unwittingly step into. We have heard that the term ‘bioregion’ has been co-opted by sections of the far right in Germany because it speaks to a nativist anti-immigrant ‘blood and soil’ ideology. Perhaps not only in Germany. Ella Hubbard, a geographer at Sheffield University whose essay earlier this year charted the history of bioregional thought reminds us not to be politically naïve, and champions using the verb:

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.

There is power in saying who belongs, and who does not; there’s power in who allocates resources, who influences the cultural narrative, who owns assets, sets wages.

One critique of power is to follow the juxtaposition of ‘bio’ and ‘region’ to its natural conclusion: that nature should have the same legal rights as us. A campaign is growing for example to grant legal personhood to the River Wye, the much-loved local river. The Wye, together with the lower reaches of Britain’s biggest river, the Severn, forms the boundaries of our Forest of Dean bioregion. Wildlife in the Wye is being suffocated by eutrophication due to run off from agriculture and intensive chicken farming. A lawsuit to sanction these activities earlier this year was unsuccessful. But the legal ground is shifting. In October 2022, the UK’s Law Society publication ‘Law in the Emerging Bio Age‘ made the argument that granting legal personhood to non-human entities is essential to tackle climate breakdown and biodiversity loss. One of the reports co-authors Dr Wendy Schultz said:

We aren’t wise enough to...manage the ripple effects of decisions we make about our relationship with the living environment. Part of the issue is embedding some sort of framework for accountability and responsibility for the consequences of these things we do, and that’s where law comes in.

Who knows what ripple effect there may be on other unequal power relations if we elevate the status of nature? But more of that later.

Living Systems Thinking

Employing regenerative thinking and practice can also elevate us out of political naivety. It reminds us that living systems are nested; simpler systems take direction from higher-level systems and develop ways to add value to those higher ones. There are two radical thoughts within this understanding of life. First, that far from the bioregion being an entity to itself, a zone of exclusionary identity, it is in fact always nested in and contributing to wider landscapes. And second that the only way it can maintain its health is when there is a balanced economy of interests between parts and wider wholes. Think of the human body: no part of a healthy body gains its health at the expense of other parts. As Leen Gorissen and others write in a study on regenerative design for the Belgian Government (in their presidency role for the EU Council):

As long as the body is healthy, the body’s ecology and economy are one, there is no conflict. There are no rich and poor organs. The wealth and vitality of your body, as in any living system, is in the whole, not the parts...Vital for any regeneration process is thus living systems thinking, a discipline for seeing wholes, interdependencies, interrelations, and higher order potential.

Back to ‘Being’

Let’s return to this question of how are we being asked to ‘be’? It’s more nuanced than we think. Regenerative practice offers another useful framework. It focuses on three aspects of human nature: function, being and will.  All three need to be in harmony with each other for systems to regenerate.

Function involves all that we do. In day-to-day life our predominant concern is with function—getting things done. But valuing only ‘doing’ and results, will be a restraint to doing or thinking about doing things differently.  

Courtesy Regenesis Group

Being has to do with who we are as we function. It’s a quality of energy. Fixing something requires a problem-solving energy: we objectify the world, break it into components, analyse, ideate and scale solutions. Restoring and regenerating wholes requires an entirely different quality of energy. We listen and watch, wait for patterns to emerge, experiment, let go and let come.

Will is the key. The quality of will that shapes our being and doing differently, is a will that is bigger than all of us.  Rather than inner wilfulness, the nature of this will is sourced from outside ourselves. It’s the will of life to keep unfolding, changing, evolving. We are simply instruments of this wider whole, motivated by the potential we see that it has to evolve, and by the unique contribution we can each make to grow its capacity and capability to do this.

Implications for our work                                                                                                                                             

Story of Place

 How do we find this potential? The wider whole for us, the Forest of Dean bioregion, most definitely sees itself as a whole ‘life place’. Reserved as a hunting ground in the Middle Ages by the Tudor Kings, its great oaks also built their warships. Coal and iron ore were mined even before the Romans came for its mineral wealth. Then during the industrial revolution, a million tonnes of coal a year were pulled from the ground and shipped on barges down the Wye and the Severn. It has long been the engine of the old extractive economy. The story that inspires the Council now is that the Forest could be transformed to become the engine of the new green economy. It’s a neat reversal. But imagine if we could create and sustain the momentum for such an ambition through people creating an inspiring and shared narrative of transition, rooted in the essence of the place?

Regenerative practice answers exactly this. Asking questions like ‘how does this place renew itself; for what purpose; and what value has it consistently offered to people who are drawn here’, the practice looks for patterns through deep time, drawing on local geology, hydrology, ecology, migration flows, social history. It looks for patterns that resonate in the present, in people’s daily experience, and because it reaches deep into the core that vitalises the place, it can also surface an answer to the question what could the place now become in response to the challenges of the present?

Community Wealth Creation and Metrics

The prospect of starting this process with local people excites us. The promise is that the story shapes not only the higher state the place can evolve to, but also how to get there, rooted in the culture of the Forest community. To ensure that this work is connected, we hope to work with the Council to convene a diverse group of stakeholders, a local guild if you like of organisations including the Forest Food Network (see the first blog), who would commit to bring the vocation to life. This will require each guild member to ask what new capabilities will each of us need to develop if the vocation is to be realised? We will need to plan to get there. And we will need to ensure we build not only financial capital, but human, social, natural and made capital too so that we manifest wealth for the community in the round. These ‘systemic effects’ will become the source of our metrics, the goals each organisation sets for itself and the data we each collect that will tell us we are on track.

Climate Change

While we cannot predict what will surface through the process, it’s a fair guess that nature will feature. There is overwhelming local support for the Forest to be designated a UNESCO Biosphere.  Yet nature like us is vulnerable to climate change. The sheer unpredictability of weather patterns is disturbing nature’s rhythms and relationships and we know already some species will not cope. We need eyes on the landscape to watch for changes, pick up patterns, to enable the community to learn together based on data how to intervene to ensure nature survives and thrives. Bioregioning Tayside in Scotland is pioneering this through locally resourced ‘community science’, rather than the more commonly known ‘citizen science’ which is driven by professionals and experts from outside the community. Many of us are considering following suit:

Community science is defined as scientific research and monitoring, based on scientific modes of inquiry, which are (i) community-driven and community-controlled, (ii) characterized by place-based knowledge and social learning, collective action and empowerment, and (iii) with the normative aim to negotiate, improve and/or transform governance for stewardship and social-ecological sustainability.

The Power in the Doughnut

Our final consideration is of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut, which has been hugely influential. We have experience with it, contributing to the creation of the Devon Doughnut. Our local Council in the Forest is considering how it too might use the doughnut in the work of transition. Given the arguments that regenerative practice makes for evoking ‘will’ for restoring the natural capacities for places to renew themselves, we now believe the Doughnut has greatest value when in service to a community generated ‘story of place’. The questions posed in the Doughnut’s 4 lenses below can shape the vocation the story points towards because they give language to challenges of today. We think these questions might serve how the Forest responds from its core identity to our social and ecological pressures, and through this, express the next level of its potential as a bio-regioning community. But we step into this process first with a clear, and felt sense of the patterns that have endured and have made the place unique.

In other words, the Doughnut is a valuable instrument for stimulating a dynamic image in our collective minds of a future more highly evolved state that the Forest could move towards, as a whole. But we focus first on understanding, embodying the Forest as a whole living being, always like ourselves, in the process of becoming.

Courtesy Doughnut Economics Action Lab

There's another useful dimension to the Doughnut too. Earlier we discussed bioregioning’s potential to critique how power works. Ownership of local companies brings considerable power. The Doughnut, as applied to business, champions a change to power relations for the sake of greater and fairer wealth. It points us towards the steward ownership movement pioneered in Germany by companies first Zeiss then Bosch and now many others. Steward ownership is based on a radically different view of who owns the value created in a business. Steward owners believe it is both founders and workers who own the wealth; that workers should be the guardians of its mission and purpose. A key belief is that profits are not extracted, but reinvested for the common good, often in the local community.

Imagine the impact on social inequalities if we could bring more steward ownership into this country?*

The Doughnut elegantly codifies this shift in what’s called enterprise design. Design of a business is explored across five design layers: a company’s Purpose, Networks, Governance, Ownership, and Finance, to facilitate the shift. We are registered to offer this work. But what's becoming clear through writing this piece is that this too is absent a context, a context that a story of place can provide. In fact if you look at 'enterprise design' through the lens above of function-being-will, you see that the change in 'function' that enterprise design invites cannot be transformative as an island. For this it needs to be congruent with a new quality of 'will' which is sourced from the spirit of a wider whole, in our case the Forest, and congruent with a 'being' state of care, and connection, and open to the Copernican revolution we talk about in the previous article. For those local business pioneers who feel a pull to play a bigger role in their local community we hope this framing might arouse their curiosity.

And there I think I'll stop. It's strengthened me/us writing this (I've been checking in with fellow directors) because we've realised we've needed to pause and clarify together what it is it that we're doing, also so we can weave a narrative for those who visit. But now that the buzzing in our heads has died down, we're all ears.

Paul Pivcevic, July 2024

Paul has been consulting to the Wilderness Centre since 2020. He has now joined the Board of Wylderne Ltd., a Community Benefit Society that plans to trade as the Wilderness Centre, and to develop its role into a bioregional learning centre for the Forest of Dean.

* The Employee Ownership Association promotes steward ownership in the UK

What Data Do We Need for the Green Economy?

For a regenerative and distributive economy what is the data that we need in order to make decisions, to know we are on track, to alert us if we’re losing our way? This post looks at the question from the perspective of our business, the Wilderness Centre. The next post will look at it from the perspective of the whole Forest of Dean bioregion.

 Let’s start with us. Here at the Wilderness Centre we are transitioning from running a for-profit business to a regenerative Community Benefit Society run by and for the community, with the purpose of doing our bit to enable the whole region to thrive.

This is transforming how we think about data.

 Like every conventional business, we have so far been collecting and generating data that would be considered ‘good practice’: cash flow forecasts, monitoring costs and forward sales, watching changes in market pricing, checking in regularly with staff, collecting customer feedback.

 But we’re also beginning to collect data to support the regenerative journey.  So far that’s focused on developing the ’value offer’ for the schools who come here. This has meant giving the 30 acres of meadows and ancient woodland that surround us a chance to evolve in a way they once did before intensive farming arrived by introducing a variety of grazing animals. The effect of the Dartmoor ponies, grazing cattle and wild boar from the Forest has enormously enhanced the experience and learning of the children who come here on their school residentials.

 Gathering data is adding value

To manage this successfully we have been gathering data: observing the behaviours of the animals, where they graze, what they feed on and what not, and how plant diversity, insects and birds are responding. Our instructors share with the students what we are learning. They bring the children into contact with the grazing animals, awakening their curiosity, and open their eyes to each living plant or animal, not as separate beings, but as part of the wider system they have a role to play in. The ponies will happily munch a willow branch the instructors give the children to feed them. But who knew that the willow tree, which provides not only an important habitat for many frogs and birds, and its blossoms an important source of early nectar for insects, was also the ponies medicine cabinet? Its leaves and bark contain salicin, a natural painkiller that eases joint and muscle pain.

 The point to get across is that if we humans too are nature, then like the willow, we have our own unique role too. And this seems to be learning how to create the context for life to connect and thrive. How we collect data, see patterns, is reinforcing this role.

 An independent local ecologist, and the University of Gloucester are doing the quantitative measuring of our increasing biodiversity. This is one way of measuring what impact the change in land use having but we need to understand is it also indicating healthier systems with a restored capacity to evolve! Over time it will also be important to know what capacity the uptick in biodiversity is giving the land to sequester more carbon. We have to do our bit towards net zero. Encouragingly, a report in March this year suggested that projecting forward 20 years or so, our wilding will have sequestered almost as much carbon had we planted native woodland. But meanwhile, we will have grown not only natural capital, but human and social capital too.

The Lure of Simple Metrics

In other words, we aren’t focused on or allowing ourselves to get distracted by any one data point, or measure. It would be easy for example, to focus only on carbon to the exclusion of biodiversity or get alarmed at the number of thistles spreading across the wildflower meadows. That would be to lose sight of the whole, of which carbon and thistles are both a part. It’s a discipline not to be dragged into: following norms set for business or by long-held tradition in land management.

Take thistles. The conventional wisdom is that grazing animals don’t eat thistles, they overtake grasslands, and they should be removed. However, we have found that this is simply not the case. Strimming just a few thistle tops has brought our Dartmoor ponies over to munch them where they’ve dropped. And in any case thistles have their role. They are a rich source of nutrients for animals as well as nectar that sustains many bees, migrating painted lady butterflies and monarchs, and their seeds are an important part of the diet of our finches.

 That is not to say we have a definitive answer on exactly how many thistles is too many. Or too few for that matter. We just keep watching for patterns, notice how the animals respond, and continue to experiment. And sit with the discomfort that we’re not really in control. Amplified by the discomfort of farming neighbours watching us who like sitting on their hands even less.

 We’re not complacent about carbon by the way, expecting that increased biodiversity in our soils will do all the work. We are making a strategic choice. The new government plans to decarbonise the electricity supply, so in addition to our focus on land, we plan to focus on decarbonising heating, and insulating the buildings rather than putting up more solar panels,. This is the straightforward but not unimportant part of regenerative work: maintaining business viability, at the same time as improving it.

 In the conventional economy, data is collected in order to manage risks, to reduce costs and illuminate opportunities. Data collection is related most closely to maintaining, accumulating and accelerating the flows of finance, not to enhancing life or wealth in the round. The engine of this conventional economy, the profit-making business, is concerned with survival in competitive markets, its licence to operate, growth, and producing returns for investors. The business is at the centre of its universe.

A Copernican revolution

By contrast, a regenerative economy, an economy that is premised on us human beings seeing ourselves bound up with Nature demands nothing less than a revolution in this thinking. Of the same order as Copernicus proving that it was the Sun not the Earth at the centre of our solar system. That’s becoming clear to us.

 In this new regenerative universe, the business is ousted from the centre, and replaced by its stakeholders. The business has transcended its ‘ego’.  Its survival and growth is no longer the compelling objective. It takes its place in the world like every other living thing that has a lifespan and a season. Thriving and financial growth are a consequence of a healthy business ecology, not the sole driving focus. Growth becomes ‘wealth’, from weal in old English, meaning ‘the best for someone or something’. The role of business is transformed from accumulating wealth for itself, into convening and facilitating the best for its whole stakeholder system while holding in mind the regenerative value it can uniquely bring to its beneficiaries.

 In fact, it’s role could be described as serving a ‘value-adding process for all stakeholders’ such that each can grow their own life-enhancing capabilities and express more of what gives them life and meaning. After all, a regenerative business is not an island: it cannot claim to be regenerative unless all is regenerating around it. For their turn, each stakeholder is invited to invest in a wealth-creating process for them all, while the business commits itself to do what it can uniquely do well to fulfil its purpose, in whichever place, or places it operates.

 What does this commitment mean for the Wilderness? Our stakeholders are Nature around us, our wider Forest community and bioregion, our Co-creators (our people, our suppliers, our contractors) our Investors, and of course our Beneficiaries, the range of people who come here to learn and enjoy the place. What we can uniquely do, our essence as a business if you like, is to build people’s capacity for ecological literacy. We can reawaken their role in bringing thriving to Nature and thereby to ourselves, wherever they live, school or work. It’s a work in progress and always will be.

Systemic effects

We’re proud of where we’ve got to, but we are only on the first rung of the ladder. The data that would tell us we are on track with other stakeholders is glaringly absent. At our community open day in August we will meet the Forest Food Network, and hope to take an important next step. We will explore together the wider effect we might create together across the Forest region. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could feed all those who come to the Wilderness from food produced locally, including from our allotment garden. And at the same time through our alliance with local growers, lift up all local food production in a way that regenerates, rather than depletes our soils?

 The schematic below we’ve found helpful. It was developed by a regenerative business practitioner colleague Beatrice Ungard. On the far left you have ‘systemic effects’. One such effect, or ‘end state’, could be a regenerative local food economy in the Forest that is so integrated that it has the capacity to keep evolving its role in creating ‘wealth’ for the Forest. But what could be the signs to look for that we’re approaching this state?  If they were inspired by having an end state vision, we hope that Food Forest Network members might ‘run the movie’ of this regenerative food system in their heads and decide together what those signs would be, the data that would indicate the healthy food system we should be looking for.  And it won’t happen by itself. As Beatrice’s schematic shows; there’s a plan to be putting in place.

How to think about what data will measure the effects of regenerative business

Courtesy Beatrice Ungard, Regenesis Group

Guided by the end state movie, members will need to develop new skills (new ‘ableness’), new ways of thinking, new business models. Only then can we know what is meaningful data to track at the individual organisation level, because at that stage each business will know both the big picture and what capabilities it needs to grow in order to develop its unique value-adding role. My particular beef at the Wilderness is changing the measure of what children value as a good breakfast: taking away the option of comforting but sugar-packed cereals and toasted white bread and jam and keeping the fruit option and local boar bacon or boar sausage rolls. Maybe having local yoghurt and nuts too. But that’s just me. And I’m jumping the gun.

Philosophically this approach is a world away from ESG, the measure the corporate world looks to in order to have a more positive impact and be a better option for investors. ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) is the collective term for a business's impact on the environment and society, as well as how robust and transparent its governance is in its leadership, executive pay, audits, internal controls, and shareholder rights.

Gathering data as development

In this universe, data is collected in fragments:  employee surveys, environmental audits, human rights assessments. It may be well intended, but if you look again at Beatrice’s diagram, there is no systemic aim for all this data gathering that would tie it together for a collective regenerative purpose. Without a systemic end state in mind for the human communities, organisations and ecological systems a business operates within and has an impact on, there is not a chance of building the capacity of these communities or ecological systems to keep regenerating themselves. The business is again at the centre, floating in its profit-making bubble managing the inconvenience of the impacts of making money, and unable to see the financial economy as a wholly dependent subset tethered within wider nature that makes all life and wealth possible. Strong ESG ratings are only rated as important if they are linked to financial performance. That tells you all you need to know.

If however, we could lift up the purpose of ESG to serve a wider aim, and as in the case of the thistle, see data gathering as a learning process as much as a number to grasp and settle on, then its role could be a transformational one. It’s good to be reminded of Goodhart's law, warning of unintended consequences of non-systemic thinking: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".[1]

The next blog will look at metrics in a regenerative economy from the perspective of the ‘bioregion’.

Paul has been consulting to the Wilderness Centre since 2020. He has now joined the Board of Wylderne Ltd., a Community Benefit Society that plans to trade as the Wilderness Centre, and to develop its role into a bioregional learning centre for the Forest of Dean.