This is the fourth section of an essay, "Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions," by David Bollier and Natasha Hulst. The remaining section will be published tomorrow. The full essay can be downloaded as a PDF here. Previous sections appeared in sequence immediately before this one, at these links: Section 1. Introduction & Reframing the Economy Around Bioregioning; 2. Commons as Relational Provisioning and Governance; and 3. Toward a New Theory of Value (and Meaning): Living Systems as Generative.
4. Toward Socio-ecological Markets
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. Their basic challenge is to fend off outside commercial control and extraction (while obviously continuing many commercial dealings) so that the regional economy can benefit from the “multiplier effect” of locally circulated money while ensuring strong ecological stewardship and regional identity and culture.
Without some deliberate strategies for consolidating market activity within bioregions – making enterprises more interdependent and regionally focused – the priorities of capitalist businesses and global capital will override regional eco-stewardship and self-determination. Attempts to build a coherent regional economy and identity will be subordinated to “free market” imperatives and everything they privilege
It is impossible to prescribe a single strategic template for addressing these issues, however. An agenda this broad, ambitious, and long-term will necessarily vary from one bioregion to another. That said, in conjunction with commons, bioregional market structures and strategies could prod commerce to become more place-committed and socially embedded. These bioregional strategies include:
A. Community-designed infrastructures for bioregional production. Community participation in creating and managing small, shared infrastructures can be catalytic for the bioregional economy in general (commercial, commons-based, social, ecological). Shared bioregional infrastructures can reduce overhead, transport, and retail costs. It can make essential services like WiFi access, solar energy, water systems, grain milling, information-sharing, and databases -- more accessible and shareable, all while strengthening social cohesion and bioregional identity.
B. Inalienable shared assets. Assuring that major bioregional assets like arable land, groundwater, housing, forests, and other “natural assets” remain inalienable – off-limits in perpetuity to private purchase – makes a bioregion more stable and secure. It prevents companies and private equity funds from acquiring essential infrastructure through which they would extract exorbitant rents, siphoning money away from the bioregion. Keeping shared assets inalienable also addresses social inequity by making essential equity assets free or lower-cost, and available in perpetuity. For example, groups like Agrarian Trust (US) and Terre de Liens (France) rely on community land trusts to make land inalienable and stewarded as commons, which has all sorts of salutary effects: farmland for a younger generation of farmers, reduced equity costs that enable organic, local agriculture, and meaningful long-term employment for local residents.
C. Bounded market structures and relationships. Food system expert Ken Meter, author of Building Community Food Webs, has spent his career bringing together farmers, suppliers, food processors, wholesalers, distributors, institutional food services, and restaurants as coherent regional “food webs.”[27] When disaggregated players are organized into interdependent networks of mutual commitment and commerce, a region benefits. It can insulate itself from the vagaries of national and global markets while also building regional identity and pride. Many experiments are underway to build more coordinated, integrated regional food systems.
D. Peer-organized governance of specific sectors. A group called “Float” -- funding lab for open agroecological technologies – is experimenting with “community-led innovation prioritization and resource allocation” among its network of agroecological farmers, technologies, researchers, and civil society players.[28] The project is a self-conscious attempt to build commons-based infrastructures, open source technologies (“good enough for now, safe enough to try”), and knowledge-sharing practices that can work at multiple, interconnected scales (farm, community, territory, ecosystem). Float’s community-based governance prototype suggests the promise of self-organized, independent regimes for bioregional governance.
E. “Stinted markets” to assure affordable access. The “stinting” of markets has a long history in medieval markets as a way to protect community interests, as Lewis Hyde explains in his book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership.[29] Hyde reports that markets in the eighteenth century “could not operate without regard for the provisioning of commoners and the poor. Farmers, for example, were obliged to bring grain to market rather than sell it in the field to wholesalers, and markets themselves were fenced, as it were, so that speculators couldn’t outbid the poor.” The “orderly regulation of Preston market” in 1795 held that “none but the town’s people are permitted to buy during the first hour, which is from eight to nine in the morning…” In another town, writes Hyde, “’hucksters, higglers, and retailers’ were excluded in the morning until noon.”[30] Modern-day adaptations of this principle, as well as gleaning – the right to scavenge for crops left in the field after the harvest – could also be considered.
F. Complementary bioregional currencies. Place-based currencies have great promise as a way for communities to retain the economic value generated in a region, rather than allowing it to be siphoned off to big-city financial centers and private firms. Of course, it can take a lot of work to launch a bioregional currency that is used by a large and diverse enough group of businesses and consumers, in ways that engender trust and market exchange. Still, the idea has proven precedents. For example, the BerkShares in western Massachusetts, used by hundreds of businesses and thousands of consumers, amounts to a sophisticated buy-local program that distinguishes local businesses from their global counterparts and builds pride in Berkshire County-sourced goods and services.[31] There are many possible designs for bioregional currencies and token systems, but the goal is generally to privilege and intensify regional market exchange over that of undifferentiated national or international markets that extract value from a region rather than re-circulate it.
G. Mutual credits systems, timebanking, crowdfunding. At more modest scales, these vehicles for pooling money have shown their effectiveness. While each has different functional challenges, small scale mutual credit systems (regional, local and even neighborhood-based (see groups like Grassroots Economics Foundation in Kenya), mutual aid networks that operate timebanks, a service-barter system, and crowdfunding platforms for commons projects (see Goteo in Europe) offer worthy models. The challenge is to develop sufficient social commitment-pooling before the introduction of an exchange system so that people can prioritize shared community goals, and not simply revert to transactional, self-interested roles.
H. Common funds, aka ROSCAs. The informal pooling of money has a long tradition throughout history, most notably among women in Africa and the African diaspora. Social money-pooling, or a common fund, has many names – susu, partner, meeting-turn, box-hand, sol – but the practice is generically known to scholars as ROSCAs, an acronym for “rotating savings and credit associations.”[32] ROSCAs provide a way for people of color and modest means to take care of their financial needs (saving, borrowing, investment) when banking systems are unfriendly or unaffordable, often for racialized reasons. Such traditional systems of self-help could play an important role in bioregional finance, helping to integrate economic exchange with regional self-reliance.
I. Government procurement policies. State policy can be used to develop regional businesses channeling its large purchasing demand toward in-region vendors. Using state, regional, and local government purchasing to “buy local” could help any number of commercial sectors to grow and invigorate the bioregional economy.
J. Import-replacement strategies. The Schumacher Center for a New Economics has long advocated that regions develop “import replacement” strategies so that specific crops, goods, and services can be offered by “homegrown” independent businesses as possible, rather than depending on national and international businesses. The point is to foster greater regional self-reliance and an economic multiplier effect within the region, rather than losing that money to external businesses and financial institutions. Some players in the degrowth fashion movement are actively experimenting with designing fiber-growing and textile production as integrated bioregional systems. British activist Zoe Gilbertson of Liflad CIC has focused on how to grow flax and hemp bioregionally in the UK, as are groups like Fashion Act Now, OurCommon.Market, and open source textile processing company Fantasy Fibre Mill.
K. Community Wealth Building. The nonprofit Democracy Collaborative has developed a number of strategies to invigorate regional economies through “buy local” relationships, strengthening local businesses, and creating worker cooperatives. In cities like Cleveland, Ohio, and Preston, England, “anchor institutions” like universities and hospitals commit to purchasing goods and services locally, spurring shared economic prosperity, racial equity, ecological sustainability, and democratic ownership and control.[33]
L. Geographic indicators for bioregional products. When distinctive products are widely identified with a particular region, they are often able to get formal legal recognition through a kind of trademark-like protection known as “geographic indicators,” or GI. This legal form is a way to support businesses that produce distinctive, region-specific products such as wine, cheese, textiles, and meat such as Chablis, Champagne, Parma ham, and Kente fabric design. There is legitimate controversy over what types of product names should be considered generic, and the circumstances under which a region should be allowed to claim exclusive control over a name. That said, with appropriate safeguards (i.e., avoiding the privatization of existing generic names), there is a strong case to be made for developing bioregion-specific trade names to support those economies.
M. Local bio-based building materials. Without much fanfare, a number of experiments are underway to develop climate-friendly, hyperlocal building materials that can acceptably substitute (in terms of fire-resistance, moisture-control, etc.) for carbon-intensive modern synthetics. Examples include hemp, stray, clay, ecologically harvested timber and wood chips. While such materials hold great promise, they often require new design methods, construction procedures, commercial sourcing, building code reform, economic efficiencies, etc. – areas that deserve further exploration and development.[34]
N. Culture-led energy transitions. Although most energy-generation in industrialized countries is controlled from the top down via large utilities, energy companies, and the state, there is growing experimentation with decentralized legal regimes and tech innovation controlled by local and regional players. This is often driven more by local culture than by technology alone, a topic often studied under the term “energy humanities.”[35] In particular, countries like Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, and Ukraine (following the devastation of war) are finding it useful to support local energy-generation to unleash greater local self-determination, creativity, and system-resilience. The Danish island Samsø has become a model for self-sufficient renewable energy using wind, solar, and biomass, and will host a major conference in 2026 on localized energy.[36]
O. Support to democratize local ownership. The City of New York has a dedicated program to encourage the creation and financing of cooperatives. In the UK, the Centre for Democratic Business is strengthening localism through the “social club movement” as forces for social solidarity and collective investment. Innovative financial schemes such as “Exit to Community” are enabling privately held small businesses to sell to community members rather than to private investors through IPOs [Initial Public Offerings]. Michael Shuman, a leading expert on local economics and finance, believes that latent synergies among community banking, public finance, and crowdfunding are finally arriving, opening up new possibilities for Main Street investment.[37]
P. Cosmolocal production. A new stage of common-based peer production is known as “cosmo-local production,” an outgrowth of open source software that shares design and knowledge on a global scale, via the Internet, while enabling the production of physical equipment at local levels, using less expensive, modular components than conventional manufacturing. The system provides ways for farmers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and hobbyists to produce first-rate innovations without the burdens of carbon-intensive transport and proprietary corporate control and prices. Cosmo-local production techniques are currently being used for such varied things as furniture, farm equipment, motor vehicles, prosthetic limbs, and automated insulin-delivery pumps for people with diabetes.[38]
Q. Collaborations with Indigenous peoples. For obvious reasons Indigenous peoples have enormous contributions that they can make to bioregioning efforts – in resurrecting eco-cultural practices of the past, learning about the spirits and behaviors of more-than-human life, and forging shared commitments to restoration. For example, the Cascadia Department of Bioregion has worked with tribes in Canada to develop maps of Indigenous homelands – noting heritage orchards, fishing spots, bird colonies, ancient First Nation sites -- before colonial conquests had decimated them.[39] Such ecological, cultural, and practical knowledge offers importance guidance in developing a bioregional vision.
R. Bioregional festivals. The importance of nurturing a bioregional culture cannot be overstated. Besides promoting bioregional commons and markets, it’s valuable to host festivals to celebrate the culture through learning, exhibitions, and family fun. Pete Seeger’s famous Clearwater festivals on the Hudson River in New York State were an early example of this. Many communities already have festivals to celebrate local agriculture or signature fruits or vegetables. Expanding such efforts and giving them a bioregional focus – such as the Green Heart Festival planned for 2026 in The Netherlands – are important ways to popularize the challenges and enlist the support of a broader public.
How to pursue the above strategies? That, truly, is the work ahead. Brave, experimental, creative work is needed to develop functional, socially integrated initiatives and infrastructures. One overarching priority must be the nurturing of new modes of finance. We must move from a finance that demands private benefits at scale, as purely transactional and extractive, to finance systems grounded in particular places and cooperative relationships, all closely aligned with living systems.
NOTES
[27] Ken Meter, Building Community Food Webs (Island Press, 2021).
[29] Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 34.
[30] Hyde, p. 37.
[31] https://centerforneweconomics.org/apply/local-currencies-program
[32] Caroline Shenaz Hossein, The Banker Ladies: Vanguards of Solidarity Economics and Community-Based Banks (University of Toronto Press, 2024).
[33] Community Wealth Building project (Democracy Collaborative), at https://www.democracycollaborative.org/community-wealth-building
[34] See e.g., Autopoeiesis, at http://www.autopoiesis.life; and UMass Amherst Design/Build program, and its BIO-Pod design concept (Build It Ourselves – Bio-based materials).
[35] https://www.energiesunited.com
[36] https://clean-energy-islands.ec.europa.eu/news/profile-samso-island-insp...
[37] Devin D. Thorpe and Jen Risley, “The Superpowers of Main Street," Main Street Journal, November 7, 2025, at https://www.superpowers4good.com/p/the-superpowers-of-main-street.
[38] See, e.g., The Cosmolocal Reader at https://clreader.net.
[39] Sheila Harrington, Julie Stevenson, et al. Islands in the Salish Sea: A Community Atlas (2025).
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