Resilience Earth
🌐Resilience Earth is a nonprofit worker cooperative based in Catalonia, Spain, dedicated to transformative change through community resilience, regenerative design, democratic innovation and the social and solidarity economy.
Bioregional Context
Located in Northern Catalonia, La Garrotxa encompasses 21 municipalities with approximately 60,000 residents. It's a mountainous comarca best known for its dramatic volcanic landscape, featuring over 40 dormant volcanic cones, lush forests, and fertile valleys.
Background
Located in Northern Catalonia, La Garrotxa encompasses 21 municipalities with approximately 60,000 residents. It's a mountainous comarca (county) best known for its dramatic volcanic landscape. The region features over 40 dormant volcanic cones, lush forests, and fertile valleys shaped by ancient lava flows. La Garrotxa has a strong tradition of environmental stewardship, sustainable tourism, and local food systems.
Origins and Network
Resilience Earth started eight years ago when two co-founders, Erika and Oscar, began working in La Garrotxa. Today, they're a nonprofit worker cooperative of 14 people, but their approach remains fundamentally the same: working from the edge, focusing on centers rather than boundaries, building theory from practice rather than applying frameworks.
They've discovered bioregioning through doing. As Oscar reflects, "We're going really bottom up. We're not following a lot of the theoretical framework—we're kind of building one little by little as we evolve and as we work more on our territories."
Philosophy & Approach
After seven years of practice, their most useful tool became “landscape units”—a framework developed by Joan M. at the University of Girona. La Garrotxa has 2.5 landscape units, each usually spanning four to six municipalities with shared characteristics. Units can act as centers because municipalities within them are tightly interlinked. River work might span seven or eight units; ecosystem work gathers the units around a feature. The frame flexes with strategy and goal.
They focus on managing interconnectivity. From that angle, boundaries create more problems than clarity; what counts are centers—places where relationships and coherence emerge.
They set out to root change in one place—under their feet in La Garrotxa—and to convene actors around a shared aim rather than lead alone.
Activities
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.
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.
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.
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.
Vision and Legacy
Resilience Earth brings more than eight years of practice and a theoretical model refined in use. Two years ago the Barcelona provincial government asked them to define territorial resilience; they used the commission to consolidate learnings into a framework that continues to guide the work.
Their through-line is resilience thinking, interconnectivity, and centers over boundaries. They have shown democracy shifting in small towns, strategy emerging from broad participation, and—when governance is truly shared—politics edging toward service rather than capture.
Their experience suggests bioregional governance can change how people relate to place, how decisions are made, and how communities coordinate from the smallest municipality to the full bioregion—democracy practiced by the people who live there.