Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions

Our essay, Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions, is now out.

In this essay, David Bollier and I explore why so many approaches to nature finance, even well-intended ones, struggle to create lasting change, and what it might mean to rethink finance so it can genuinely support living systems, commons, and bioregional transition.

This essay has been a long time coming. David and I have been working on it on and off for nearly five years. For me, it brings together more than twenty years of work, learning, and many dead ends at the intersection of finance and nature.

Over the years, I’ve worked across many of the dominant frameworks and roles — from payments for ecosystem services and natural capital, to impact and biodiversity monitoring, circular economy approaches, and even biodiversity offsetting. I’ve also seen these dynamics from the inside while working with philanthropic foundations and impact investors, where the desire to do good often runs up against the same structural limitations embedded in prevailing financial logics. Each of these experiences offered partial insights, but none fully aligned with how living systems actually function or with what I sensed was ethically and relationally at stake.

What ultimately brought it all together for me was a place-based, bioregional perspective. Rooting value in specific landscapes, communities, and living systems, rather than abstract metrics or universal models, made it possible to see finance not as an external force acting on nature, but as something that must be embedded in place and accountable to it.

The real turning point came through working on the decommodification of land and nature, learning how to take land out of speculative markets rather than finding ever more sophisticated ways to price, trade, or offset it. That shift fundamentally reframed the question for me: away from how to make nature legible to markets, and toward how to create financial and governance structures that protect land, support care, and hold it in trust for future generations.

Meeting David was pivotal in articulating this synthesis. In this essay we propose a new theory of value, one that moves beyond extraction, compensation, and metrics, and instead centers relationality, care, and the conditions for life to flourish within real places and bioregions. Working with such a generous and rigorous mind has been a gift.

Much of this thinking has since been practiced and tested through Grond van Bestaan, Voedselpark Amsterdam, and more recently as bioregional portfolio weaver with Bioregional Weaving Labs. These lived experiences are woven throughout the essay.

David has written beautifully about this essay in his recent blog post, “Bioregionalism, Commoning, and Relationalized Finance,” where he serializes our 13,000-word essay and reflects on both the risks of bioregionalism becoming an empty buzzword and its real potential as a grounded, politically accessible framework for transformation, asking what kind of theory of value, governance, and finance is actually needed if bioregionalism is to remain emancipatory rather than extractive.

This essay feels less like an endpoint than a threshold: a way of naming what has been emerging all along, and opening space for a different relationship between finance, land, and life.

You can download the full essay here.