🍥 Governance Design
Activities
Vision for 2100
The working group is drafting a long-range biocultural vision: what South Asia might become by 2100. In that speculative picture, borders grow permeable; visas fade. Wildlife, nomadic pastoralists, and others move more freely. Older trade corridors such as the Silk Road reappear in new form. Border zones, once flashpoints, become peace sanctuaries run locally through strong direct democracy. Today’s hyper-nationalism gives way, in the vision, to civilizational and Indigenous identities; direct democracy is rooted in villages and neighborhoods and scales up across landscapes into bioregional governance. Traders and nomadic communities act as connectors—carrying news and goods across the bioregion.
Local Governance Innovation
They partnered with the Graton Community Services District (sewer) to broaden its mandate toward parks, recreation, and eventually ecosystem services and recommoning. The district now holds the town square and additional public space, with more planned. They also work with the Gold Ridge Resource Conservation District—linking formal institutions to an informal web of residents, businesses, and volunteers.
Legal Innovation and Policy Development
The Legal Innovation Team supports Forever Sabah with strategic legal analysis—entry points in statute for a circular economy, and space to prototype policy, legal, and institutional options. It works with civil society, lawyers, and scholars to review Sabah land and environmental law, compare international models, and track relevant global processes. An initial output is a multimedia handbook on Sabah land and environmental law, with briefs summarising key laws, policies, and institutions in plain language.
Governance Platform Methodology
Strong pilots often stall because they lack governance that can carry them. Curridabat’s answer was a methodological bet on platforms—shared systems many projects can join. The move is from supply-side planning (predetermined projects pushed outward) to demand-side work: use data and stories to open conversation, let communities name needs through informed dialogue, let projects emerge as responses, and learn when outcomes diverge from expectations. The city contrasts low-value governance (short horizons, scarce resources, agendas set elsewhere) with high-value governance: local decision-making power, capabilities treated as a system, strategy guiding choices over time, and culture treated as an asset rather than an obstacle. Scaling regenerative work depends less on any single project’s brilliance than on governance for the project—designed alongside the project. Four moves anchor the platform: clarify demand, reshape governance, open new conversations, and strengthen capability systems.
Pollinator Citizenship Program
The city treated the pollination system as an active partner—an alliance that fed information back into governance. The relationship moved through three recognitions: pollinators as mediators between people and ecosystems, pollinators as agents of prosperity in both ecological and economic terms, and finally pollinators as citizens with standing in the city’s political imagination. The Pollinator Citizenship Program mapped the city from a “bee’s eye view,” cutting across ordinary public–private boundaries. Supporting pollinators required seeing the territory as one system—an archipelago of places where nectar and pollen exist—so that corridors for pollinators could run across parcels and land-tenure lines. In practice, that meant governance that recognizes non-human residents, design and regulation attentive to pollinator needs, continuous corridor-building across ownership types, and a view of the city as several overlapping systems working at once.
Producer-Centered Governance Design
A core tenet of the Foodshed Trust model is that producers must play a central role in funding decisions, infrastructure design, and enterprise development. The organization is hosting a series of listening sessions and design workshops with producers across the region to co-create these governance models. Over time, these governance frameworks will be embedded into the operation of the Trust's capital vehicles and community land tools.