South Asia Bioregionalism Working Group
🌐The South Asia Bioregionalism Working Group is a voluntary network reimagining ecoregional and bioregional governance for South Asia, challenging rigid nation-state boundaries through biocultural perspectives.
Bioregional Context
South Asia faces multiple intersecting crises—climate chaos, rising nationalism, border conflicts, and ecological degradation. The region's watersheds, like the Ganges, flow through multiple countries, divided by arbitrary borders that fragment ecological and cultural flows.
- Network Affiliation
- r3.0
Background
Across South Asia, climate disruption, nationalism, border conflict, and ecological decline overlap. At the same time, thousands of grassroots initiatives are working for change.
A political map fractures the subcontinent into seven or eight countries—lines drawn by empire and colonial history. The same territory read through watersheds and culture looks different: the Ganges crosses three or four countries, its basin sliced by borders. An upstream state can dam a river with little regard for people, wildlife, or ecology downstream.
Origins and Network
In October 2019, at a Democracy Vikalp Sangam—an Alternatives Confluence in India—participants already gathered to talk about democracy asked why South Asia could not host a bioregional process of its own.
The South Asia Bioregionalism Working Group formed from that question. COVID-19 soon blocked in-person meetings, but work continued online: people kept meeting digitally to reimagine South Asia from biocultural starting points and to question nation-state lines that split ecological flows, cultural exchange, and long-standing economic ties.
The group pursues several aims. One is co-creating knowledge and awareness—advanced partly through reports now feeding modest advocacy. A larger unfinished task is helping communities on the ground reimagine their ecoregions and bioregions and, from there, influencing governance.
Activities
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.
Bioregional Mapping of India
A major project set out to map bioregional boundaries across India. The team worked back from district lines imposed under British rule, layering other evidence. Sources included mythology and folklore, travelogues and explorers’ accounts, memoirs by rulers and poets, geographic writing from inside and outside the subcontinent—including colonial records—and state tourism and culture material that preserved regional names and ways of life. Through that work they mapped roughly 65 to 70 percent of India—a baseline for discussing the country’s bioregional structure.
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.
Vision and Legacy
The South Asia Bioregionalism Working Group represents a growing movement of people across South Asia who believe that reimagining governance from a biocultural perspective isn't just an interesting idea—it's essential for survival in a climate-changed world where rigid political boundaries will only create more conflict and suffering.
They've produced three reports on reimagining South Asia from a bioregional perspective, with another one or two coming out. They've organized webinars learning from bioregional approaches across the world. They're hosting a training course—a certificate course on bioregionalism with about 25 participants, put together by their collaborator ATREE with the bioregionalism working group and some of their other organizations.
They're asking fundamental questions: What if governance matched ecological boundaries? What if cultural flows weren't severed by political lines? What if the people who have lived in these bioregions for centuries could once again move, trade, and care for these landscapes as they did before colonization divided them?
The answers to these questions are still emerging. But in the work of people like Ashish, Nisha, Sonam, and Utham—in their mapping, their research, their visioning, their patient building of relationships across borders—we can see the seeds of a different future taking root.
Sources
| Type | Name | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Video | r3.0 Bioregional Open Dialogue 3 - South Asia Bioregional Working Group | ↗ |