Bioregionalism, Commoning, and Relationalized Finance

We also propose a new sort of noncapitalist finance, which is much-needed because so many traditional and even progressive finance schemes fail in their stated ambitions. So we propose the idea of “transvestment” of money from capitalist to commons-stewarded circuits of value, and forms of “relationalized finance” based on place-committed social relationships and commerce. 

From our perspective, the challenge is less about channeling more capital to bioregional change in the short term (usually resulting in weak, capitalist-facing non-solutions) than in changing the fundamental dynamics of finance itself.

Here is the Introduction and Section 1 of our essay. The remaining four sections will be posted here every day this week.

Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions

There is a long history of attempting to solve knotty ecological problems by marshalling the power of capitalist markets, finance, technology, and instrumental rationality. An incomplete list of historical examples includes proposals to treat earthly systems as “natural capital”; cost-benefit analyses to assess acceptable economic impacts on ecosystems; “corporate social responsibility” to protect the environment and serve communities; ESG investment screens [environmental, social, and governance protocols] to encourage progressive social and environmental goals; the monetizing of “nature’s services” as an attempt to “internalize” the actual value of nature in market prices and thereby shift investment; “sustainable development” as a way to keep economic growth within the natural limits of ecosystems; carbon-offset markets and eco-credits to incentivize business investment in emission-reductions and other green practices; the concepts of “green capitalism” and the “circular economy” as omnibus strategies for reducing industrial harm to the environment; and more recently, the trending adjective “regenerative” to name business practices said to foster biodiversity, resilience, and ecological vigor.

While this eclectic parade of “new and improved” eco-strategies has had some salutary effects, they have not made significant, lasting progress in “solving” the identified problems. The arc of climate collapse has continued apace, and a host of additional environmental crises (desertification, ocean acidification, volatile hydrological cycles, biodiversity loss, and more) has intensified. The modest impact of various green strategies should not be surprising; none really alters the core structural dynamics of capitalist finance and markets. Each new eco-strategy arrives with a buzz of fresh optimism and ideas, but the core priorities of economic growth, solid financial returns, and investor control of capital allocation remain firmly intact. 

It may not matter whether the various eco-gambits are intended as cynical charades or serious interventions. As a recent report on “nature finance” concludes, “the global economy’s financial flows speak for themselves”: 

“More than $7 trillion a year in finance continues to subsidise harm, while less than $200 billion flows into protection or restorations, of which over 82% comes from public sources…This is not a question of misallocation: there are structural design flaws that entrench the very patterns that need to be shifted. These design flaws create reinforcing feedback loops: they lock in high-carbon, high extraction economic systems and make it hard for nature-positive alternatives to compete. Without confronting these systemic lock-ins, even well-intentioned capital will end up flowing along the same worn grooves.”[1] 

The report quotes an investor’s rueful confession: “We’ve spent five years trying to make nature investable — and still, the capital barely moves.”

Mindful of this dismaying historical record, this essay proposes the development of a new, distinct class of noncapitalist finance rooted in very different socio-economic and political logics. As the Circular Bioeconomy Alliance report astutely notes, “[T]he question is not only how we mobilise more nature finance, but how we confront the nature of finance itself.” With respect to these two propositions, two overarching insights are clear: 

1) Changing dominant finance structures through state action (legislation, regulation, international treaties, etc.) is a nonstarter for now. The nation-state and capitalist interests are too deeply allied and mutually committed to capitalist growth and finance structures to wish to change them. (That said, there are niche opportunities, especially at the municipal level, to develop bioregionally oriented commons/public partnerships.)

2) Creating new types of finance is entirely feasible, but only by expanding the scope of existing finance models beyond finance itself. There must be a coherent (noncapitalist) theory of value and empowered bioregional players (commons, communities, place-committed businesses). They, in turn, must have the motivation and capacity to limit value-extraction, privilege regenerative practices, nourish practitioner-driven eco-stewardship, and control new types of bioregional finance facilities (BFFs).[

While there are many embryonic, experimental finance innovations that might evolve to meet these criteria, in this essay we wish to propose a compelling scenario that we call relationalized finance, intended as a prime vehicle to develop bioregional social economies. In the course of introducing and explaining this idea, we raise several larger issues that apply more generally to the challenge of developing a noncapitalist finance and social transformation. 

Relationalized financeis our generic 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. This noncapitalist finance is nonextractive, 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 artfully aligned and entwined with each other. 

Because nature and modern economics have very different ontological and operational dynamics, there is a critical need for intermediary bodies for investment, to bridge and respectfully navigate those differences. It’s also important to name the value-shift that occurs when money is transferred from capitalist circuits of value to commons-stewarded regimes of value and meaning. We call this transvestment to indicate that investment in the latter value-regime has very different logics (holistic, ecological, social, ethical) than that of conventional capitalist investment. We will return to both of these topics – intermediary bodies and transvestment –  in Section 5.

For now, it is enough to say that relationalized finance is quite different from “regenerative finance” or “green finance.” While the latter systems may foster environmentally beneficial results, they fail to recognize that they are foisting an alien order of money, contracts, and private property on ecosystems. Regenerative finance superimposes modern onto-epistemological logics and norms onto nature, prioritizing, for example, competition and productivity, the financial claims of investors and lenders, and Western legal regimes for property, contracts, state regulation, and finance.[3]   

Relationalized finance, by contrast, is structurally designed to prioritize the ecological imperatives of a bioregional landscape, as various ventures (businesses, commons, nonprofits, state bodies) work as conscientious partners with natural systems. This may mean preserving wetlands, species habitats, biodiverse forests, and sacred spaces despite the economic constraints these priorities may impose. The point is to skillfully conjoin the terms of finance with a bioregion’s watersheds, forests, arable land as well as human provisioning systems, communities of practice, and culture.

In relationalized finance, the onto-epistemological clash of finance and ecosystems is frankly acknowledged. It is “worked with,” much as a diplomat negotiates working relationships between nations with very different worldviews and cultures. Critically, this reframing of the challenge empowers on-the-ground players with greater control over the terms of finance. They must have the ability to adopt investment priorities and methodologies congruent with their self-identified bioregional needs.

An important shift occurs when economies are reframed as bioregionally grounded phenomena. Economic activity can begin to reorient itself and adapt – synergistically, constructively, respectfully – to specific ecologies of land, soils, waterways, forests, plants, crops, wildlife, and weather patterns. This sort of bioregional integration and coherence is precisely what early visionaries such as Peter Berg, David Haenke, Kirkpatrick Sale, and others called for in the 1970s and 1980s, before the neoliberal economic orthodoxy took root worldwide, in effect imposing a forty-year hiatus (~1980-2020) on bioregional transformation.

To guide the reader through the “new logics” that we see relationalized finance enacting, we explore the following themes in the pages below:

1.  Reframing the Economy Around Bioregioning [below]

2.  Commoning as Relational Provisioning and Governance

3.  Toward a New Theory of Value (and Meaning): Living Systems as Generative

4.  Toward Socio-ecological Markets

5.  Relationalized Finance: Bridging the Chasm

1.  Reframing the Economy around Bioregioning

A big part of the polycrisis that has engulfed modern civilization is actually a meta-crisis – a failure of the framework of standard economics and the liberal polity to properly understand non-economic realities.[4] Most notably, the free-market narrative and its thought-categories do not give full weight to the living dynamics of ecosystems. Important human needs and capacities are also marginalized, such as desires for fairness, a sense of belonging, shared purpose, self-determination, and creative agency. 

The economic model of humanity, Homo economicus, does not entirely override our inborn propensities to cooperate, but it does aggressively channel them into capitalist market regimes that privilege selfish, materialistic, competitive traits. Such markets elevate and engineer individual atomization and non-relationality as a strategy for maximizing seller sovereignty and revenues. State law and policy, for their part, prioritize centralized, top-down, technocratic, and siloed approaches to problem-solving. This institutional mindset of control tends to erode local agency and resilience.[5] Symptoms are treated instead of causes. People feel powerless and marginalized in their everyday lives.

The Internet and other digital networks have radically decentralized creativity and control on a global scale even as nation-states and corporations scramble to reconsolidate their massive top-down powers. As a result, there is a growing chasm between vernacular cultures of bottom-up participation and the naked authoritarianism and dysfunctional scale of nation-states. The state may claim the powers of legality, but commoners often have greater legitimacy. For now, this standoff is eclipsing serious conversations about climate, ecosystem protection, and economic change even as these challenges become more urgent than ever. 

However these macro-political struggles play out, we believe that the strongest strategy for reconstituting democratic practice and culture lies in bioregionalism. The limits of remote, corruptible legislatures, regulatory agencies, and courts in overseeing structural transformation have become clear over the past sixty years. What is needed are relational worldviews and social practices that directly steward the health of land and water. Systemic change must be grounded in lived experience and culture at the cellular level; meso- and macro-institutions must play important roles, but generally do not have the situated knowledge, keen motivation, and legitimacy of place-committed players.

A bioregional lens is immensely useful in this regard because it offers practical, accessible ways to connect people with the living systems of particular places on which they depend – watersheds, soils, food systems, regional histories, and other contextual factors. The bioregional lens asks: What does this place need to thrive, and how can people here organize to meet those needs fairly and within planetary boundaries? 

The bioregional vision emerged in the 1970s, when writers, ecologists, and grassroots activists recognized that modern economies were overshooting the carrying capacity of the Earth. Early bioregionalists proposed reorganizing life within ecological rather than political boundaries, watersheds instead of borders, and foodsheds instead of global supply chains. Cultivating local cultures and economic relations are powerful ways to encourage humanity to live within natural limits, rather than celebrating capitalist fantasies of no limits.

Over the decades, the bioregional vision has matured to inform both grassroots practice and systemic innovation -- from ecological restoration projects and community-supported agriculture to regional food strategies and cooperative energy systems. What began as a countercultural movement is now being redeveloped as a practical framework for regeneration. Bioregional mapping helps us see that regeneration must be both ecological and social. Healthy landscapes require communities that can care for them. Healthy communities must be able to act as stewards of beloved landscapes, food systems, and waterways, and not treat them as tradeable commodities. Using a bioregional lens means that ordinary people can more readily:

• Connect scales – link local action (like a farmer restoring soil or a cooperative producing renewable energy) to systemic change across a whole region.
• Build resilience – recognize that climate, water, and food security are best safeguarded when rooted in local capacity and shared responsibility.
• Weave belonging – create the conditions where people work together, develop trust, and see themselves as co-stewards of their place.

This sensibility is not abstract theory; it is already happening. Community land trusts are keeping farmland in production for future generations. Local food initiatives are shortening supply chains while rebuilding community ties and self-reliance. Cooperative energy projects are making neighborhoods both more resilient and more inclusive. When approached through a bioregional lens, ecological regeneration and social regeneration begin to blend and fortify each another. Looking ahead, the bioregional approach will be essential for navigating transitions in agriculture, water management, housing, and energy. It can help align investments with what specific ecosystems and communities truly need, rather than conceding investments to investor allocations of capital that prioritize short-term returns and scant genuine care.  

But how exactly can these goals be effectively pursued on the ground and expanded? It is not enough for people to recognize how their quality of life relates to the health of land and water around them. New productive and social relations, including new forms of finance, must take root outside of the control of capitalist investment. Otherwise, bioregions will morph into zones of neocolonial capitalist extraction. This pattern can already be seen in the long history of “green co-optation” referenced above. 

Combining the bioregional vision with the pragmatics of commoning lead us to 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. 

NOTES

[1] Circular Bioeconomy Alliance and Ostara et al., “Designing for Life: Reimagining Nature Finance,” October 2025, at https://www.ostaracollective.org/designing-for-life-reimagining-nature-finance. The report notes: “Only 18% corresponds to private finance ($35 billion), of which more than half is channels through biodiversity offsets and credits, and sustainable supply chains, while the annual contribution of philanthropy and NGOs is estimated at $3.9 billion. Meanwhile, harmful subsidies (from industrial agriculture to fossil fuels) continue to incentivise extraction over regeneration. Global trade norms, shaped by the priorities of capital mobility and market liberalization, systematically devalue nature’s relational and place-based functions.”

[2] The concept of BFFs was introduced by Samantha Power and Leon Seefeld in their report, “Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet” (Oakland, California: The BioFi Project, 2024), at https://www.biofi.earth/biofi-book.

[3] See, e.g., Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality Princeton University Press, 2019).

[4] Jonathan Rowson and Perspectiva, “Prefixing the World,” September 5, 2023, at https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/prefixing-the-world.

[5] For more on the propensities of state power, see, e.g., the books of political scientist James C. Scott, such as Seeing Like a State, The Art of Not Being Governed, and Against the Grain.