⭕ Community Governance
Collective life is not discovered; it is practiced. Governance is the name we give to how a group holds disagreement, distributes attention, and keeps promises about land, water, or money over years that outlast any single leader. The patterns here are less about org charts than about habits: how people meet, how decisions are slowed down or sped up, and how repair happens when harm has already occurred. What threads through these case studies is the question of legitimacy—who can speak, who must be heard, and how a bioregion can steer without pretending its conflicts have disappeared.
Ontology
Activities
National and International Advocacy
In 1989, TBS and village partners discussed how mining in the Aravallis—near Sariska—was undermining johads. Dr. Singh concluded blasting had opened fractures in aquifers; communities needed relief. In 1990 TBS petitioned the Supreme Court to close those mines; in 1991 the Court ordered a stop, and in 1992 the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests restricted mining in parts of the range. To press state compliance, TBS and allies staged an 800-km march across four states. Dr. Singh walked from Himmatnagar, Gujarat, toward Delhi from 2 October 1993 for over four months. Advocacy of this kind contributed to closing some 28,000 mines by 1996. By 2001–02, TBS was contesting the 2002 National Water Policy, fearing it would deepen privatized control of water. The Rashtriya Jal Chetna Yatra crossed 320 districts in 30 states over fourteen months. That campaign helped launch Rashtriya Jal Biradari (RJB), a national forum in 2001 that ran roughly a decade—public meetings, riparian problem-solving, outreach to ministers and officials, and litigation where needed. In the 2020s, Jal Biradari linked to global drought-and-flood dialogue; the network claims more than 1,000 members and bodies such as the Indian Himalayan River Basin Council and the Indian Peninsular River Basin Council. With TBS vice chairman Professor G.D. Agarwal (environmentalist, former IIT Kanpur dean), the organization pressed for the Ganga. From 2008 his fasts—including over damming the Bhagirathi headstream—drew national attention. In February 2009, one outcome was national-river status for the Ganga and creation of the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGBRA).
Community-Led Governance
To counter government contracts for commercial fishing that risked overuse, habitat harm, and displacement, TBS helped communities create the River Arvari Sansad (River Arvari Parliament) in 1998. The body drew gram sabhas from 72 villages along the river. With more than 140 members, the Parliament challenged those contracts through public-interest litigation until the Supreme Court canceled them—asserting community rights to water and land over company concessions. It sets rules for the river, banks, and catchment; for crops, fishing, grazing, borewells, and thirsty crops such as sugarcane—embodying local stewardship of shared resources. The twin villages of Bhaonta–Koylala, leaders in Arvari’s revival, received the first Down to Earth Joseph C. John award for an environmental community from President K.R. Narayanan on 28 March 2000. Similar models are spreading along rivers such as Chambal and Dholpur.
Strategic Planning
In 2022, they finalized and took part in implementing a five-year strategic plan for the Sitka Tribe of Alaska and began facilitating an update of the comprehensive community plan for Yakutat in partnership with the local government. These are practical tools for communities to articulate their own visions and chart their own paths forward.
Sustainable Southeast Partnership
The Sustainable Southeast Partnership (SSP)—a Spruce Root and Sealaska program—works as a regional collective-impact network. It supports collaborative, community-led responses to linked social, ecological, and economic challenges, guided by Indigenous values. Individuals, Tribal governments, Native corporations, nonprofits, agencies, businesses, and others can take part. Village-level hosts appoint community catalysts who assess energy, food, natural resources, and economic sustainability, then surface projects—from food security and energy to habitat restoration—and pair with regional catalysts on design, implementation, and tracking. Regional catalysts also shape policy, help build cooperatives and mutual support, and run workshops to grow capacity. In practice, SSP is bioregional governance: place-rooted, accountable to communities, and woven from village to region.
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.
Learning from Practical Experiments
Before leaning on abstract theory, they looked at what was already happening. One touchstone was a river parliament catalyzed by [[Tarun Bharat Sangh]], where roughly 60 to 70 villages in one river basin in Western India built institutions to govern the basin together. They also reviewed river-basin authorities and transboundary schemes—often top-down, bureaucratic, and narrow in how they defined a river’s social and ecological life. To widen the lens, they organized about 15 webinars: practitioners described experiments on the ground; others shared bioregional work from outside the region and took part in mutual learning.
Storytelling of Ravens
The Trust's first major initiative was Storytelling of Ravens, an in-person convening format that began in Sitka, Alaska in 2019. These gatherings brought together Ravens from across the bioregion to share personal stories of local resilience and regenerative solutions. The events emphasize emotional and relational depth, fostering transformation through shared vulnerability and celebration of what's working. From Oregon to Alaska, these annual gatherings weave together a network of changemakers who share knowledge, build relationships, and inspire collective action.
Local Government Incubator (INCAT)
Last year they opened an incubator for local governments—after many incubators for co-ops and nonprofits. Seven municipalities joined, all led by women—some in government, some in opposition—united in wanting a paradigm shift. Seven of twenty-one is a notable push; INCAT projects were striking in scope.
Democracy Festival (Festival Iltir)
To channel energy around that tension, they launched a Democracy Festival (Festival Iltir)—a space to surface what was moving. Interest ran high across sectors: large firms, public agencies, even the regional police chief engaged seriously. Last year’s festival drew 300 participants, including people from Barcelona and Catalonia’s national government, exploring how such processes could scale.
La Garrotxa 2030 Strategic Planning Initiative
In late 2019, participatory governance was spreading across La Garrotxa; several rural municipalities had piloted citizen participation, often co-designed and facilitated by Resilience Earth. Seeing a chance to lift municipal learning to regional scale, they proposed co-producing a Strategic Plan for Territorial Resilience with the regional government. The president backed it politically and financially—with one condition: the plan must transform how governance is practiced region-wide. A core group of 12 people, chosen for sectoral, geographic, and cultural diversity, became the “critical yeast” tasked with keeping the process participatory and transparent enough to catalyze broader change. Months into the pandemic, they ran 17 online thematic round tables aligned with the SDGs. Over 600 people joined during COVID—“that was nuts,” Oscar recalls. To reach youth and diverse communities, they produced materials for 57 schools and held sessions in community centers and places of worship with minority groups. A wide survey drew more than 2,200 responses. In all, 40-plus participatory sessions fed a ten-year regional plan. Direct participation reached 7,000–7,500 people—over 11% of the population. They adapted the SDGs into 21 local targets (“Garrotxa SDGs”) that different actors could own, paired with an observatory of 400-plus indicators to track the plan. A tension surfaced: once strategy, indicators, and distributed governance are in place, traditional electoral politics can feel redundant. Oscar asks what remains for a party platform when “everything is been decided”—whether officials become “public service servers” carrying out what communities already decide in everyday hubs. Some elected leaders resisted, sensing the process could sideline them. They used an iceberg model to push strategies to real depth—and that resistance is still in play.
Beuda Democratic Innovation Project
They began seven years ago in Beuda, one of the smallest towns in La Garrotxa. Oscar says starting from the edge made sense: “It would be really difficult for us to start in the center because you know ruralities can be quite resistant to change behaviors sometimes.” Several municipalities were shifting away from long-serving “constructing mayors”—older men, often from construction—who had grown towns through housing for decades; some residents decided there were enough houses and voted differently. In Beuda they built relationships with residents pushing for change. Results have been striking: early terms brought sociocratic town elections that lasted six years and matured into circles for culture, environment, and more; government grew more open. In the latest term, the governing team stepped back; council members formed a new group and ran for office. Representatives now sit at council tables themselves—government and council partly fused. The town has inspired others. Since then, 14 of La Garrotxa’s 21 municipalities have experimented—some heavier on education, most on government, each in its own way.
Cascadia Bioregion Program
BioRegen (the Cascadia Bioregion Program) tackles the “readiness” question: preparing local landscapes to absorb regenerative investment through community-led capacity. The program guides 10+ landscapes through a 12-month arc—ecological mapping, regenerative portfolios, budgeting, and success measures grounded in local priorities rather than outside corporate or government defaults. Communities self-organize into hubs that can receive and steward capital while deepening planning and governance. Work is anchored in a shared bioregional identity, living-systems principles, and long-term, trust-based investment readiness. Cohorts map assets, build portfolios, set budgets and strategies, and seed projects for funding. The BioRegen pilot (including what was called the Landscape Hub Cultivator) is underway as of 2026. It supports up to 10 Regenerate Cascadia landscape groups in an online community of practice to define what a landscape hub is and lay its foundations—interrupting entrenched patterns, treating relationship networks as essential for trust, practicing participatory governance across nested scales, and building bioregional infrastructure so funding can flow where Cascadia needs it. The first half-year emphasizes place-based regeneration strategies—bioregional mapping, nested scales of place, layers of stewardship—and a portfolio of regenerative projects per landscape with budget and story materials for communities and funders. The second half focuses on core teams, fundraising, governance, consent, carrying capacity, context-based indicators, and local funding ecosystems. Each landscape group receives $8,000 in direct support through the pilot (about $5,000 for planning and mapping and $3,000 for a flow-funding sandbox).
Hubs and Guilds Development Program
This is a structured capacity system—nested support from local landscapes to the full bioregion. It sets up landscape hubs that convene diverse actors—land trusts, solar installers, housing developers—to shape shared landscape visions with real budgets. Hubs cover defined areas and help administer bioregional regeneration funds. Guilds—communities of practice on topics landscape leaders need—produce classes, resources, and directories. An ambassador network orients newcomers to Cascadia, bioregionalism, mapping, and why those frames matter.
Regional Activation Tour
To learn what regeneration would take, Brandon and Claire ran a month-long Regional Activation Tour in October 2023, soon after they met. With more than 100 organizers and projects around the Salish Sea and Willamette Valley, they visited 14 communities in 30 days and met over 1,000 people through talks, field visits, workshops, and interviews—all asking what it would take to regenerate an entire bioregion. Elders at each stop shared knowledge; the team documented bioregional learning around that question. They followed with an online capstone so participants could workshop and share expertise, then a Cascadia Summit to shape what Regenerate Cascadia would become. A major output was a movement map—who and what sit where, and where trust must be built through relationships, not anonymous institutions. Several core design challenges emerged. Work happens in landscapes but stays disconnected. Capacity to support it is thin. In Seattle, Brandon notes, people can discuss raising $54 billion for a third phase of light rail or hundreds of millions for schools via levies—but regenerating a watershed is often “give to your local nonprofit.” The design problem: help practitioners see their work, connect with others, and get resourced. Funding pathways for watershed regeneration are weak. Practitioners are underfunded and lack time to hunt for grants. Work stays siloed, competitive, and project-sized rather than coordinated at landscape or bioregional scale—even when funders exist, bridges to people on the ground are missing. Roughly 130–140 people stayed engaged after the tour; the movement map continues to show where regeneration lives and where new links are needed.
Deep Economic Code Work
The deepest layer addresses the “economic code” of the place—alliances among academia, institutions, and government to move beyond GDP toward more holistic metrics that shape decisions and finance. The tension is to pair a bold horizon with practical next steps.
Regenerative Action in Thematic Areas
A middle layer focuses on thematic work across the Sydney bioregion and metro—food systems, river restoration, and related themes. Specialists have labored in these areas for decades but are not always woven into one strategy. Regen Sydney aims to convene unlikely alliances, align intentions, and apply upward pressure on existing government layers. They are beginning with the Cooks River Alliance in a southwest catchment and are watching where that collaboration leads.
Waverley Community of Practice
In Waverley they are midway through a three-phase program. Phase one—community of practice. They invited groups already active locally—Transition Bondi, Bondi Innovation, beach cleanups, and others—and asked what regeneration in this neighborhood could mean. Over four months they balanced rigor (so institutions would take outcomes seriously) with convivial process—picnics, film nights, and similar gatherings. A community of practice of about 160 people formed; visioning held social and ecological dimensions together. Mapping exercises helped people attune to the place’s particular rhythms. Phase two—cornerstone indicators. Guided by Katherine Trebeck, they use “cornerstone” measures as a counterpoint to indicators that read as technical or illegible to the public. The idea: a small set of metrics the public can stand behind—living at the interface between institutions and communities. Cornerstone indicators braid social and ecological dimensions. One example: families who are glad not to need a car in a given area—touching transport, services, autonomy, and emissions in one indicator. Midway through phase two, they compare the neighborhood vision (informed by memory of pre-colonial conditions and honest about structural barriers) with what council is already doing, surface gaps, and ask how to measure progress toward the vision. Phase three—transition pathways. They will help people find roles in the transition. With vision and indicator-backed targets, the question becomes how the community can act together in ways that complement council and raise ambition. Methods will include live modeling games and “warm data” sessions to weave diverse knowledges. Participants have already offered sharp reflections—for instance, that connection to place can rest in a deeper spiritual bond with nature. There is no single fix; some see Waverley’s doughnut work as carrying wider significance.
The Connectivity Partnership
The Connectivity Partnership formalises cooperation among NGOs (WWF-New Zealand, NZ Landcare Trust), agencies, and iwi—pooling knowledge, co-funding, and coordinating corridors and catchments. It helped lift neighbourhood projects toward landscape strategies for biodiversity, pests, and water that braid western science with Māori worldviews. A parallel aim is syndicated investment: government, philanthropy, and impact capital opening shared windows for community priorities.
Te Kete Hononga: The Basket of Connections
Te Kete Hononga (“basket of connections”) bundles navigation support for community initiatives: funding, training, and agencies threaded through a trusted Kairaranga (weaver)—a local person trained to open doors across the system. One contact per community reduces friction with fragmented government programmes while keeping authority close to whānau knowledge and aspirations.
He Ripo Kau: A Vision for the Hokianga
He Ripo Kau applies the Tapere logic in Hokianga—linking taiao renewal with mana tangata. Since 2016, hui have convened hau kāinga around a shared model. NZD 3.2 million in Provincial Growth Fund support underpinned a 2020 recovery and employment wave—45+ km of stream fencing, 50+ ha planted, and training pipelines into land-care jobs. The case shows vision translating into paid, on-ground regeneration.
Tapere: Planning Rooted in Ancestral Boundaries
Tapere builds hyper-local plans aligned with Māori tapere land units—not imported grid lines. Reconnecting Northland supports hapū and whānau to state restoration goals that match culture and geography. Wānanga, story, and mapping invite communities to picture thriving ancestral estates. Visions then steer practical work—planting, stream repair, nature-based enterprise—through a shared cultural lens, with connectivity and corridors treated as landscape-scale outcomes.
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.
Green Valley Commons
In year one they formed a nonprofit and turned a former gas station at the town center into a new town square—Green Valley Commons. They raised over $1 million through land-trust funding, public sources, private gifts, and crowdfunding, then ran a community design process so neighbors could imagine the shared space. The Commons now hosts cooperative workdays, events, youth gatherings, and early shared childcare and food-growing. A lease-to-own agreement gives site control; they are working toward an outright purchase. Early support is in place; they seek $250,000 in catalytic capital to secure title, advance priority capital work (permitting, kitchen, ADA access), and strengthen programming and local governance.
Osa Biocultural Fund
The Osa Biocultural Fund is a flexible tool to seed community-run work in food sovereignty, ecological restoration, arts, and education. It is designed with participatory governance anchored in local women and elders. They are seeking $29,000 to develop and scale the fund, which distributes more than $25,000 a year to regenerative projects. One fully participatory round used $6,000. Ambassadors, the council, participants, and investors all voted on which projects to fund. That modest sum has helped spark broader collaboration—among them a complementary currency at the local farmers market and a microcredit system applicants now run themselves.
ReGenerOsa Women's Governance Circle
ReGenerOsa is guided by what it calls the Council of Eight—a circle of eight long-serving local women leaders, including Indigenous, campesina, and Afro–Costa Rican elders—who set direction and keep activities accountable to place-based wisdom. Hazel, who works with the Seto Territorial Council, sits on the Council of Eight. The circle decides project priorities, how funds are allocated, and partnership terms. The collective comprises the women’s council, community weavers, donors, and ambassadors. Strengthening the structure calls for facilitation training, administrative support, and stipends for participation. The model is also meant as a prototype for other communities, showing how regenerative finance and land stewardship can be held collectively and ethically outside top-down NGO patterns.
Stone Soup Social
Like many efforts here, it began with food. The first gathering was a stone soup social—people brought ingredients, shared a meal, and started to meet. That rhythm ran from February 2, 2020, for about six weeks until COVID shut public gatherings down.
Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed
The Alliance models joint municipal–tribal planning for climate, equity, and ecosystem health. Philanthropy and unrestricted gifts have passed USD 1 million toward a watershed regeneration action plan. The Alliance aims to cut risk to USD 400 million+ in climate-exposed assets in a 30-odd-square-mile basin. With the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation, it is advancing a 5,000-square-foot resilience hub showcasing regenerative building plus farmer training and land access.
Northeast Bioregional Strategy & Intertribal Governance Framework
A draft regional regenerative strategy—Indigenous co-governance at the core—bundles restoration with food, fiber, and fuel systems, then links those to efficient buildings, clean energy, and active mobility (trails, multi-use paths). The spatial imagination is villages and cities re-embedded in larger land regeneration. Co-design with tribal and non-tribal partners proceeds under rights-of-nature framing; resources are steered toward projects that earn reciprocity with Native nations facing distinct colonial legacies.
Nila Indigenous Land Trust Strategy
The aim is a Native-led land trust that can travel as a model—returning land and authority to tribal stewardship. Elements include: - USD 6–9 million for conservation easements on Kvichak Corporate lands—blocking incompatible development and speculative lodge buyouts. - USD 10 million via the Kuicaak Fund to reassemble fractionated ANCSA allotments that fragment control. - USD 2 million already raised to secure a wildlife corridor between Lake Clark and Katmai. If the corporation advances conservation on upper Caskan and Queac reaches while tribes aggregate allotments, parties could later negotiate trust terms that centre community stewardship.
Nila Vena Sustainability Forum
For roughly three years, representatives of all six tribes have met through the Nila Vena Sustainability Forum, using a council format akin to their regional health board—one appointed delegate per tribe. That familiar structure has supported dialogue on cultural revitalisation, clean energy, and regenerative economy.
River Guardians
That differentiated engagement helped turn a loose stakeholder map into a network of River Guardians—people and organisations willing to act as bioregional stewards. Cross-pollination sessions convene varied actors to compare stories, test shared identity, and build the relationships that precede joint projects.
Social Ecosystem Mapping
Early work mapped the social ecosystem: who holds stake in the basin, where they operate, and how trust might grow through repeated contact on their own ground. Mapping follows a “full polycentric” logic—many centres, each assessed with criteria fitted to local conditions, not one template. The basin is treated as a mesh of places—schools, municipalities, farms, NGOs, artists, scientists—each a centre of attention and care with different leverage on the river.
Network Naturregion Building
Many high-value patches sit isolated—a poor recipe for persistence. “Orphan” greens—verges, corporate lawns, small parks—can still host diversity if managed intentionally. The association coordinates Network Naturregion: people networking places—municipalities, schools, kindergartens, clubs, students, farmers, hunters, firms, and staff—so fragments link into something closer to a functional habitat network.
Planning Assistance to Local Governments
KEM backs districts in drafting plans that lock in environmental and social commitments—not only pilot projects. Workshops bring government, smallholders, firms, and financiers into the same conversation so VC3 logic can be embedded in formal instruments.
Multi-Stakeholder Forest Governance
In Jembrana, KEM supported Sabha Wana Kerthi, a multi-stakeholder forest forum chaired from the regional planning agency and joined by forestry and environment offices, the forest management unit (KPH), farmer groups (KTH), and firms such as Palapa (nutmeg) and Conservana Spices (vanilla, coffee, cacao). The body coordinates stewardship, benefit-sharing, and on-the-ground practice with policy.
Value Chain Collaboration Canvas
VC3 stitches stakeholders so each chain link reinforces the next. In Tabanan, agroforestry cacao growers work with Agridesa on data-backed farming, digital tools, and finance; Cau Chocolates off-takes organic, agroforestry-grown beans. When actors align, projects become investable and finance can follow. Farmers report stronger soils and bean quality plus roughly IDR 10 million extra per harvest cycle—income that helps keep forest on the land, catchments intact, and businesses viable.
Participatory Planning and Visioning
Weekend programmes included facilitated workshops for shared visioning and for drafting concrete proposals in each thematic area. The process and outcomes are documented in *Borgofuturo+ A local project for inner areas.* A core group of festival organisers, with researchers, planners, architects, and environmental scientists, then formed Inabità, a cooperative for territorial planning and governance.
Cultural Celebration Across Villages
Borgofuturo was refocused on weaving relationships and a shared valley identity through celebration and planning. Rather than a single three-day event in one village, it ran across four weekends in four villages. Between weekends, participants joined collective walks on trails linking settlements—learning the land and each other. The format moved from one centralised festival to a distributed, connected experience: walking connections that make the valley legible as one place, not a set of competing hamlets. Organisers invited residents, mayors and officials, civil-society groups, and local firms. Each weekend took one of the four strands: built infrastructure; culture; environmental education; and local production and craft.
Bioregional Congress
In October 2025, HERE convened a bioregional congress with all guilds—food, shelter, ecology, and culture—bringing together the range of voices and capacities active across the estuary.
Guild System Development
Through the BioFi Cultivator programme, HERE began convening guilds: networks of connectors and practitioners who name priority issues, commission studies, and steer funding. Four guilds are forming, each targeting at least about $1 million in community-directed capital—decisions kept close to the problem. Food tackles food-system priorities; Shelter addresses housing affordability and its overlap with climate vulnerability; Ecology coordinates forest health, invasives, deer, and rising fire risk in the Northeast; Culture holds a regenerative cultural thread so food, shelter, and ecology do not drift into silos.
Landscape Planning and Pattern Language
During onboarding, participants used cadastral sheets and community-scale maps of forest, slope, erosion risk, and connectivity to relate regeneration choices to parcel-scale management. Joint planning flagged priority zones—unstable slopes, riparian corridors, connectivity gaps—and paired them with a pattern vocabulary: swales and vetiver for erosion, agroforestry on degraded pasture, buffers near intakes. The aim was landscape literacy: seeing each plot as part of a larger system and preparing evidence for later DAO proposals.
DAO Design
Design work mapped stakeholders, translated customary decision-making into written protocols, tested tools (WhatsApp polls for low-friction votes; DAODAO training for on-chain transparency), and iterated charters for how proposals are built, voted, and executed. The first two tiers of a nested structure are live: - Stakeholder DAOs (organised groups such as ASOMEG and the Water Board) submit proposals and vote - Community DAO (Guayabillas DAO) allocates funds with representatives from each stakeholder group. - Upper tiers are scoped but not launched. Off-chain practice uses WhatsApp, assemblies, and paper or oral records where needed. On-chain, a DAODAO instance logs proposals, votes, and treasury moves; Carolina Davalos acts as a human oracle, posting community decisions so participants are not required to run wallets themselves. A Notion wiki holds governance records, training material, charters, planning tools, and spatial/MRV documentation.
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.
Mangrove Conservation and Spatial Planning
SPaCES (Spatial Planning for Conservation, Sustainable Economic Development and Society) supplies mapping and planning support across Forever Sabah programmes. Current work maps mangrove extent, loss, threats, and restoration need toward protecting Sabah’s mangrove estate. The Lower Kinabatangan & Segama programme deepens co-governance—community protocols, Locally Managed Marine Areas, and Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas—in a large mangrove–estuary system. Livelihoods (e.g. solar cold storage for fishers, ecotourism) aim to reduce extraction pressure while communities steward the wetlands they rely on.
Renewable Energy Transition
SabahRE2 (August 2021) is a four-partner consortium pursuing energy equity, livelihoods, and wellbeing for rural Sabahans. Sabah holds about 72% of Malaysia’s unelectrified rural households, so off-grid renewables are a practical lever. Year one produced a public roadmap for rural renewable electrification. The target is 200 renewable mini-grids by 2030. A demand map of ~400 villages yielded 206 meeting readiness criteria; feasibility work advanced for 35 mini-grids serving 57 villages across diverse biocultural settings.
Human-Elephant Harmony
Since 2016, Human-Elephant Harmony has worked with Dusun communities, agencies, and partners to treat conflict as a coexistence problem. Herds returned in 2014 after absence since mid-1980s forest fires. Telupid’s forests had largely become oil palm; elephants used plantations for food and reserves for daytime cover, while unfenced smallholders bore crop damage—fueling calls for relocation. From March–December 2016, Forever Sabah worked with the Telupid District Office; village input recalled older protocols of mutual respect with elephants, so the frame shifted from “conflict” to Human-Elephant Harmony. Workshops began in three villages (a fourth joined in 2018) around a four-part plan: train a Community Elephant Ranger Team, map elezone zones, build citizen science, and fence selected sites. Kopisuladan di Aki (“friendship between villagers and elephants” in Dusun Labuk)—nine young professionals with strong field knowledge—received a February 2018 National Conservation Trust Fund grant (RM 200,000 over 22 months, co-financed by the U.S. Shared Earth Foundation at USD 65,000); five members became Honorary Wildlife Wardens. “Listening to elephants” tracks movement, diet, and use of oil palm. Observation showed elephants following machinery that clears mature palms to feed on chipped replanting waste—evidence that access to oil palm matters for nutrition in these landscapes and that trade-offs around plantation entry differ from simple removal narratives. No further translocations have been attempted from this area since CERT formed; several calves have been raised in Telupid. The team estimates about 25–50 elephants use Telupid—the northern edge of the wider Central Sabahan population.
Findhorn Watershed Deer Forum
The Catchment Deer Forum aligns stalkers, gamekeepers, and other land managers so deer densities support both woodland regeneration and viable stalking. It connects herbivore pressure to tree survival and peatland recovery, while keeping venison in local supply chains—pairing ecological goals with rural food economies across fragmented ownership.
Participatory Governance Development
Governance is described as a living braid of sociocratic practice and Indigenous decision-making—listening from many directions, elders and local communities in the weave, sociocratic circles with shared representation, and decentralized, transparent mechanisms for deciding and acting. The baseline is "recognition and reciprocity first." When council decisions land, communities need capacity to move; the aim is governance patient enough for real listening yet able to act quickly once alignment appears. Pasted image 20260218174155.png From Diamante-Barú Bioregional Consortium: Activating bioregional finance facilities rooted in Indigenous reciprocity, ecological stewardship, and self-governance.
Archetype-Based Planning
Curridabat used archetypes—stand-in beings whose needs and experiences shape the story of a place—to surface gaps between today and a desired future and to support backcasting and sequencing of change. In Curridabat, archetypes ranged from pollinators, air, and water to children, very old residents, and wheelchair users—each illuminating different facets of justice, access, and ecology. The same approach was applied in Nosara, a coastal community in Guanacaste, where people chose archetypes suited to shoreline life—among them young people, species such as marine turtles that link land and sea, and everyday coastal livelihood roles—showing how the method travels beyond the city.
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.
Participatory Strategy Development
To move past only fighting emergencies, the community began a participatory strategy in 2021—spanning community, commune, region, and beyond, with an eye on water that reaches the sea: regeneration imagined from community to ocean. The aim is a ten-year-plus plan that aligns community priorities with regional institutions; maps who lives there and where to act; keeps students connected to territory; weaves internal networks for new leadership; resonates with other bioregions; and uses ecosystem thinking as its backbone. Beyond productivity-focused census categories, they built tools for household economy and composition, health, ecological knowledge, resource practices, culture and sport, and intent to stay in Mapuche territory. With Ministry of Science support and three ecological funds, they advance land-use mapping, endemic forest restoration, family finance renewal, and community-led implementation.
Network Building and Learning Exchange
A network structure has formed organically: the team connects organizations and actors running regenerative initiatives—in any dimension—to bioregional networks inside Colombia and to the Global Network of Regenerative Communities, so lessons travel horizontally rather than staying project-bound. Colombia Regenerativa still convenes bioregion-to-bioregion exchanges and, through the global network, links especially with peer processes in Latin America.
Multi-Stakeholder Governance
CEDPO’s governance is nested and statutory: a national rural-development mandate, university research capacity, an NGO fiscal backbone, and a territorial council (SETO) that mixes elected municipal and community seats—including Indigenous representation—so decisions stay accountable to place. Partners such as Regenerative Earth, INDER, PIOSA, and SETO each play a role, but the design point is co-stewardship under Law 9306: SETO meets monthly, steers the 2024–2030 territorial plan, and has moved roughly $4 million into regional priorities in recent years—including electricity for Indigenous communities that lacked grid access.
Burren Public Engagement Program
Each year the winterage—moving cattle onto the mountain—draws a public ritual around transhumance. Crowds can reach a thousand people helping move stock, with national media coverage—a visible vote of confidence in farmers who produce food and steward a globally rare landscape.
Burren Peer-to-Peer Learning Network
The programme brokers farmer-to-farmer learning: who already farms for nature pairs with neighbours who want to transition. The premise is simple—farmers often resist outside experts but listen to peers—so the network supplies structure, trust, and follow-up rather than top-down advice.
Cross-Sector Collaborative Infrastructure
Over the past two years, Blueprint has facilitated regular convenings of over 50 individuals and organizations, building shared language, governance structures, and aligned funding strategies. This infrastructure has enabled rapid collaboration across issue areas such as food security, forest health, energy access, and rural mental health. The team is creating a formal backbone organization that can hold shared capital, facilitate project incubation, and distribute funding to aligned local partners.
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.
Strategy Games
From 2023-2025, a strategy game was implemented in the Ericht catchment bioregion. The process began with listening to diverse stakeholders—farmers, anglers, land managers, estate owners, and community leaders—to understand their roles and perceptions. This information formed the basis for a prototype game representing the landscape's resources and dynamics. The games help players visualize interconnections across the landscape, demonstrating how individual actions impact others' livelihoods and environmental conditions.
Bay Delta Community Learning Ecosystem
A strategic network-building initiative that combines monthly community calls highlighting local projects with Bioregional Explorers Club field trips to build direct experience of the watershed. The program brings together diverse stakeholders through regular strategy workshops and community gatherings, focusing on building relationships and shared understanding across the bioregion.
Biofabric Places Network
The Biofabric Places Network is a collaborative system of material production hubs. The network enables different bioregions to learn from each other—materials "cooked" in similar ways but adapted to local contexts, from Middle Eastern deserts to European cities. Each time, they work together with industries, universities, and build local networks with cities and various partners to find cooperatives that can continue building and producing these materials locally. They're mainly focused on building materials, examining how waste streams in cities and larger regions can contribute to a healthier building industry.
Amazon Headwaters Bioregional Plan
The alliance's first major undertaking was creating a comprehensive regional strategy developed through an 18-month collaborative process involving extensive workshops with indigenous organizations, NGOs, and technical experts, conducted primarily in the field. The plan's defensive objectives focus on stopping extractive industries and eliminating degradation and forest loss—urgent priorities given the accelerating threats to biodiversity and cultural survival. Proactive objectives include ensuring indigenous territorial governance, promoting forest conservation and restoration, and consolidating Amazonian well-being through a holistic approach that integrates ecological, social, and economic dimensions. The alliance describes a bioregional cycle: using the plan to track progress, learn from implementation, and accumulate stories, data, and relationships that keep work moving. Fully carrying out the plan implies large investment—on the order of $18,241 billion over ten years in the published estimate—with most of the total framed as national and local public obligations, while roughly $672 million in civil-society implementation targets priority actions that complement government programs.
Cross-Border Indigenous Alliance Building
The alliance is a long-horizon effort to weave together Indigenous nations on both sides of the Ecuador–Peru border—more than 30 peoples and nationalities in a region where colonial borders have often split communities and territories. The point is not a one-off summit but sustained relationship-building: recurring Indigenous-led assemblies where people bring decisions home to their own authorities; ceremonies and protocols that set the tone before policy debate; and working sessions that can host technical and political questions—land, extraction, climate—without displacing local norms with outside timetables. Over time, that rhythm of meeting has helped groups with fraught histories see themselves as a single political and cultural force. Participants describe the shift as a “marriage between peoples,” drawing on traditional approaches to conflict resolution to move from rivalry toward shared strategy.
Altiplano Regeneration Manifesto
The common challenges facing the territory—environmental degradation, social loss, and economic uncertainty—inspired entities from across the region to unite and create a common manifesto. The manifesto serves dual purposes: acting within the territory to regenerate and revitalize it for maximum positive impact, and serving as a powerful tool to influence regional, national, and European policies. They have united, represented in the town councils, more than 200,000 people, creating a significant collective voice for bioregional regeneration. This manifesto is designed to inspire people from different organizations to join, while also devising ways to cooperate, create networks, and build synergy between territories to inspire each other.
The Common Ground Forum
When the Association of Deer Management Groups first approached the Alliance for Scotland's Rainforest a few years ago, they saw potential for collaboration—something they called "the common ground." But decades of conflict between environmental groups and deer management interests had created a deep-seated lack of trust that made even conversation feel like a distant dream. They brought in the Centre for Good Relations, specialists in civic mediation. Through careful facilitation, people from all sides of upland deer management—environmental charities, government agencies, gamekeepers, private estate managers—began meeting and building relationships of trust. As the mediation process was ending, the people involved insisted they wanted to keep going, to continue the work they'd started together. In Autumn 2023, the Common Ground Forum was born. Today, the Forum has brought together more than 500 people across Scotland's upland deer management sector. They work together through respectful, constructive conversations to make better, more informed decisions about upland deer management. Last November, their work was recognized with the Innovation Award at the Nature of Scotland Awards—the first time such a diverse group of people had received this kind of recognition together. NatureScot has also recruited two new deer management roles in the rainforest.
Governance and Values
Acción Serrana operates through a four-tiered governance model that reflects the bioregion's nested social and ecological systems: 1. At the most local level, community-led watershed councils organize activities across more than five basins, representing different communities and landscapes. 2. These councils feed into an intergenerational advisory board composed of local organizations, ensuring that wisdom from elders and innovation from youth both inform decision-making. 3. This local structure is articulated through the national Foundation of Biospheric Activities, which provides administrative and legal infrastructure. 4. Finally, international sponsors including the Triangle Foundation, Global Forest Generation, and others provide financial and technical support. The governance model embodies Acción Serrana's core values: ecological integrity, cultural resilience, youth inclusion, and reciprocity with nature. As one leader explains, these values are "very basic but really guiding the heterogeneity and diversity of our groups in the different basins."
Community Reconciliation and Forgiveness
In 2023, church leaders across the valley met together for the first time—no small feat, since many congregations would not previously share a building. By mid-2024, representatives from that gathering were each tied to an initiative in the valley—early childhood, food gardens, animal welfare, and more—another first in the historical record they can find for such a cross-cutting assembly.
ABIF Network Development Program
ABIFs are family-based ecological units where each household commits to creating a beautiful, biodiverse living space that integrates cultural and ecological practices. These socio-ecological systems form the building blocks of what ASPROCIG calls a "socioeconomical territory"—their proposal for how life should be organized. The network grows organically through a mentor-based pattern following the Fibonacci sequence. When a family member approaches a friend or neighbor who is already part of ASPROCIG, they learn about the benefits of joining. Established ABIFs provide face-to-face support to help new families set up their systems, ensuring that knowledge is continuously shared and that new families receive dedicated guidance.
Bioregional Venture Studio
A bioregional venture accelerator is taking shape to grow a network across Greater Toronto that repairs ecology and strengthens communities. It is framed to unlock labor and finance so people can scale existing businesses or start new ones, shift time into regenerative work at community level, and move beyond “day jobs” where that is the barrier. The aim is to support small and medium enterprises with finance, education, and a cooperative network inside the bioregion, alongside partners already on the ground. The accelerator would connect funders (foundations, agencies, philanthropists) with a regenerative business network and a council of advisers, using cooperative exchange to move resources. Sectors that could channel impact toward ecological renewal and community well-being include manufacturing (reducing dependence on global supply chains), water, forestry, and agriculture. The approach stresses prototyping—testing assumptions—and measuring impact in dimensions beyond financial return alone.
Circles of Activity
Work is organized around seven broad themes—Circles of Activity—treated as interconnected parts of one system. Each circle convenes cohorts with distinct roles: Conservation Authorities (the 13 authorities in the GTB, plus a municipal cohort) to advance a Portfolio of Projects for large-landscape regeneration, including food and water security; Business and Funding Leaders to help build the Bioregional Funding Ecosystem; Educators to help shape the Schools Community Network; and Healthcare Practitioners for the Wellbeing Path. Indigenous worldviews and knowledge are woven into each circle.