Bioregionalism As Our Economic System

Yes, please.

Photo by Brenton Walker on Unsplash

About a year ago in this space, I wrote about bioregionalism. For a quick review, bioregionalism is a philosophy that suggests that political, cultural, and economic systems are more sustainable and just if they are organized around naturally defined areas called bioregions.

Bioregions are geographical areas defined by distinct ecological systems, plant and animal species, soils and landforms, human settlements and cultures, and topographic features such as watersheds. Bioregions can of course spill across political boundaries.

Bioregionalism is a growing movement to again organize in bioregions to protect them and regenerate them, thereby protecting ourselves and addressing the issues of climate change and overshoot that are coming for us.

That’s all well and good, you might say, but how the hell do you organize the world around bioregions? Sure, that is the way we organized our lives in the distant past, but the world is different now. We could never do that now.

Well, someone has kind of made a plan for that.

Here’s the plan.

In December of 2025, David Bollier & Natasha Hulst released a paper titled: Relationalized Finance for Generative Living and Bioregions. The paper meticulously lays out a new approach to finance focused on meeting social and ecological needs at bioregional levels. Bollier and Hunt refer to this new take on finance as “Relationalized Finance”.

Relationalized finance is their term for finance that is not meant to generate private financial gains, but rather to support and deepen new relationships – social, economic, and political – in particular bioregions. Relationalized Finance is non-extractive, peer governed, place-specific, humane, and designed to support the generativity of living systems. It does not regard “nature” and “finance” as separate and autonomous entities, but as aligned and entwined with each other.

The authors wish to reframe the economy around bioregioning, putting bioregional needs ahead of economic ones. This would include rules around the provisioning of common use which would require a new form of governance around the use of resources.

In such a system, the responsibility for protecting and maintaining bioregions would not fall to federal governments, but would be handled by those who depend on that bioregion and live in that place. Provisioning of resources would deliberately link local action (like a farmer restoring soil or a cooperative producing renewable energy) to systemic change across a whole region. Such a system is intended to build resilience – recognizing that climate, water, and food security are best safeguarded when rooted in local capacity and shared responsibility. Such a reimagining of our economic priorities could create the conditions where people work together, develop trust, and see themselves as co-stewards of their place.

At the end of the paper, the authors invited financial professionals to join them in discussing how to facilitate the transition to such a financial system. I encourage financial professionals and policymakers to take them up on this offer and help transition to a system in which bioregional needs take precedence over financial ones.

To reframe an economy around bioregioning the authors propose the following structural premises for a healthy bioregional economy:

1. Establish protectible bodies of inalienable shared wealth stewarded as commons and allocated fairly for mutual benefit.

2. Create new infrastructures to facilitate and support commons and bounded-market exchange. 3. Rely on distributed structures to prevent corporate consolidation and abuses of market and political power. Federate distributed structures to achieve horizontal scope.

4. Use peer governance to build a culture of commoning – a task that must precede transactional exchange (so that markets don’t override shared social commitments).

5. Reconfigure state law, administration, and finance to facilitate commoning and bounded markets. Useful vehicles: commons / public partnerships, interfaces between state and commons (“neutral, diplomatic third spaces”), and formal legal recognition and support for commons.

6. Commerce and commons must actively align with ecosystems, a challenge that requires limits on extraction and a new culture of sufficiency as encouraged by new institutional forms, including new forms of trans-local cooperation.

The authors note that if bioregions are going to become more economically self-reliant and culturally self-directed, they must be able to insulate themselves from the neocolonial workings of global finance and markets. This means that bioregions must be able to assert their own investment priorities and become more self-reliant by intensifying their intra-regional commerce. Generally, put those on the ground in a place in charge of the resources of that place. Any federal government would have to play nice with the locals to get anything done.

The idea is that bioregional market structures and strategies could prod commerce to become more place-committed and socially embedded. The authors list a number of bioregional strategies that could be included. The paper goes into much more detail than I have space for her, but I list them below to give you a better understanding of some of the ideas at play.

1. Community-designed infrastructure or bioregional production

2. Inalienable shared assets (land, water, forests, etc.)

3. Bounded market structures and relationships

4. Peer-organized governance of specific sectors (community led resource allocation)

5. Stinted markets to assure affordable assets (limits on prices of assets)

6. Complementary bioregional currencies

7. Mutual credits systems, timebanking, crowdfunding

8. Common funds, aka ROSCAs

9. Government procurement policies

10. Import-replacement strategies

11. Community Wealth Building

12. Geographic indicators for bioregional products

13. Local bio-based building materials

14. Culture-led energy transitions

15. Support to democratize local ownership

16. Cosmological production (open source ethic that shares knowledge)

17. Collaborations with Indigenous peoples

18. Bioregional festivals

I recommend you read the paper to find out more for yourself if you are interested. I’d love to see some cities, then counties, then states/provinces take up these ideas. Federal governments couldn’t destroy the bioregion if they had to make sure, they protected each and every watershed, forest and river before they did any federal business. If you are interested in these ideas, you can tune into a Webinar on January 20th with the authors of the paper, hosted by r3.0 (you should check them out too).

I’ll be there.