tl;dr: Regeneration is a forward-looking paradigm focused on increasing the evolutionary ability of social-ecological systems by including everyone and everything that matters for a viable society
In 2022, Earth Overshoot Day for North America came in March, for Europe mostly in May. The unsustainability of the dominant growth- and exploitation-oriented political-economic system is out in the open, for everyone to see. At the same time, we celebrate some anniversaries this year: 50 years of the first UN conference on the natural environment in Stockholm, 50 years since the publication of “Limits go Growth”, 35 years since the publication of “Our Common Future”, and 30 years since the Earth Summit in Rio.
On this Earth Day 2022, we can look back on half a century of modern Sustainability discourse in global politics, science, business, and civil society – and have to conclude that the “Great Transformation” towards a more sustainable world, with greater social and ecological equity, is still a long way to go.
And yet the time seems right for change. Since the Great Recession of 2009, the ruling economic policy paradigm, neoliberalism, is in decline. Government interventions have saved the global economy from collapse, not free markets. The Great Lockdown of 2020, due to the Covid pandemic, has further strengthened the role of governments and of state institutions vis-à-vis the old ideas of the Washington consensus of deregulation, liberalization, and globalization. Especially globalization has taken a hit with the resurgence of nativist ideologies since 2016, the year of the double shock with Brexit and Trump. At the same time, the reality of planetary boundaries in the Anthropocene have become apparent, with mass flooding, droughts, the burning of entire communities. Geopolitical shocks like the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, but also the increasingly hostile relations between China and its neighbors and Western countries, accelerate a global realignment beyond free market and free trade ideas. The end of history has ended and there is a lot of soul-searching within governments, but also within society as a whole, how to steer the course. And this opens up an opportunity for a new economic and political paradigm. Only problem is: despite the multitude of heterodox approaches – ecological economics, degrowth, post-autistic economics, evolutionary economics, feminist economics, solidarity economics etc. – none of those has been able to break into the mainstream.
Creating a new economic policy paradigm needs to take a note from Gramsci and how to replace an existing hegemony with a new hegemony. Such a new paradigm needs a critical mass of support across society and its various actor groups. However, it has to start with a group willing to lead a “historic block” of these various actor groups – and that means a group also willing to compromise. All these heterodox approaches would then first need to find some common ground, some key ideas and concepts, that can be communicated easily to other actors, especially political and economic actors. Just think about neoliberalism: free markets, free trade, small governments – those are very simple ideas, ignoring most of the scientific debates behind them, even and especially within neoliberal economics itself. Can we do that for the economic heterodoxy as well? This would require, from everyone involved, accepting to let go of some of their core ideas in order to get others across.
Sometimes it comes down to language. Wittgenstein rightfully argued that the boundaries of my language are the boundaries of my world – and of which you cannot speak you have to be silent. For example, a term like “degrowth” might be perfect for decolonizing growth-oriented mindsets and debates, it also frustrates anyone who wants to talk about necessary growth or, like Herman E. Daly would argue, distinguish economic from uneconomic growth. One term that is good for one thing, might not be good for a whole lot of other things. But there might a way out of that.
Currently, we live in the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. The idea of building back lost ecosystem capacity and rejuvenate natural capital resonates with notions of total capital preservation from strong sustainability, as well as with the notion of a safe operating space for humanity from the planetary boundaries discourse and Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics”, including social foundations and social capital.
However, restoration might not be the proper term we are looking for to unite various heterodox perspectives. Restoration implies emergency repairs and is focused on recreating past conditions that are hard to track. For example, should we restore ecosystems to 1990s levels (the base year for GHG emissions reductions), to the year when global ecological footprint equaled global biocapacity (sometime in the late 1970s), to levels before the Great Acceleration (before 1945), or before the Orbis Spike in the early 1600s?
I would like to propose the term “regeneration” instead. Regeneration is not about building natural and social capital back towards an indeterminable pristine or just state, but to make it better by building resilience towards unknowable future shocks. Regeneration is looking forward by focusing on the increase of the evolutionary ability of social-ecological systems. This by the way also entails a positive perspective on some aspects of growth.
Such a regenerative paradigm rests on two intellectual pillars. The older one is that of regenerative design. Urban, rural, and landscape planning views regeneration as a process of inclusion of everyone and everything(s) that make a system viable. A system can be a place, a country, an organization, the entire planet. In such a perspective, regeneration connects contemporary stakeholder theory with indigenous understandings of embeddedness (Buen Vivir, RED, “Country”). Central to regenerative design are learning processes anchored in place and context.
The newer pillar is derived from these design ideas: regenerative capitalism. Capital, as all productive assets enabling a viable system, is placed under the principle of regeneration for an inclusive ecosystem economy. The driving force behind regenerative capitalism then is cooperation between different actor groups – state, market, civil society – and between human and non-human (or more than human) actors. This connects to Peter Ulrich’s idea of a live-serving and civilized market economy as well as to ecocentrist ethics.
Of course, regeneration is just a word. And regenerative economy is just an idea. However, regeneration has a different appeal than e.g. degrowth. We already know about regeneration without having to explain it a lot. We also see a regenerative economy in the rise of the renewable energy sector. The circular economy, as a business model and economic concept, is often portrayed as a regenerative economy. And in urban development the idea of regeneration is with us for many years. It is exactly this connectivity that makes regeneration and a regenerative economy all the more charming for a Gramscian overthrow of the hegemony and replace the increasingly empty political-economic mainstream with something new.
And before anyone objects: no, we don’t have to clarify every little bit of the regenerative economy, just as the neoliberals never clarified exactly what the proper policies, scopes and consequences of their basic principles are. The elegance is in the oscillation between terminological clarity and connectivity on the one hand, and conceptual and political ambiguity and flexibility on the other.
Of course, some stylized facts hold true for regeneration, regardless of its oscillatory nature:
- Natural capital cannot be built back (irreversibility), it can only be built forward (regenerated), so strong sustainability and the cautionary principle must be the guiding ideas for dealing with nature
- Instead of arguing about green growth vs sustainable degrowth, regeneration allows us to focus on necessary growth processes: economic growth focused on alleviating poverty and absolute scarcities, regeneration of ecosystems and their services, regeneration of social capital and establishing new social ties beyond the market and between social groups and individuals. All of this has to grow, sometimes even economically and materially
- The corollary is also true: regeneration means cutting back on harmful stuff, thus contracting some economic activities, in some cases down to zero. Among them are: fossil-based industries and infrastructures, excess use of material and energy for non-inclusive-value adding activities (luxury consumption, stuff like bitcoin), social inequalities and disparities (lack of opportunities and access, as well as income and wealth gaps), mental and psychosomatic illnesses and personal distress
- Inclusion of everyone and everything(s) that matter for a viable society of all humanity and beyond on a finite planet