A BioHub is a coordination body anchored in a specific BioRegion. It convenes the people, institutions, and economic actors whose activity shapes a living landscape, and it organizes their distributed contributions into verifiable commitments the outside world can contract with.
Overview
The BioHub makes visible a form of human coordination that has always existed in Nature but has only recently begun being practiced by (Westernized) humans. While it has always been practiced as part of indigenous knowledge traditions, a new form is now emerging: it organizes through pooled commitments toward outcomes no single actor can produce alone. A BioHub is where this form of coordination is practiced and made visible to a wide audience.
Most bioregions already include groups of people doing regenerative work, as distinctly different from extractive work. What is usually missing is the coordination layer that connects these activities into a single, fundable offer. A BioHub provides that layer. It redefines the work already being done in a bioregion, by organizing distributed contributions into verifiable commitments to the cities, corporations, and investors that need what the bioregion produces: functioning watersheds, biological complexity, carbon sequestration, and the data to prove it.
The shift is structural. A bioregion that asks for funding is needy. A BioRegion that makes commitments to those who need its services is needed by society. That is the distinction between a BioHub, the BioRegion itself, and a Bioregional Learning Centre. See From a Bioregion to a BioRegion for the transition from the first state to the second.
An emergent global field
The concept has been slowly emerging independently across multiple geographies and intellectual traditions. In mid-2026, Eva Gladek and colleagues at Metabolic published their 2026 BioHub Assessment, which documented 152 initiatives worldwide operating under this emergent coordination logic. What they share is a recognition that landscape-scale ecological and economic challenges require a coordination form that municipalities, conservation agencies, water authorities, and market actors cannot sustain individually.
The BioHub is that form. This wiki is a guide for establishing your own.
What the wiki covers
The material here is the portion of the founding research base that applies to any bioregion engaging with the same coordination questions. It is not exhaustive. The fields it draws from (commons governance, bioregional economics, cooperative finance, catchment hydrology, regenerative agriculture, and heritage-based education, among others) each carry deep literatures and active research communities. This site points practitioners to the main bodies of work that underpin the coordination forms now emerging, and it provides enough orientation to make the primary sources accessible.
The material is organized by topic, and each topic can be explored on its own. They can be read in any order.
The four forms of human coordination
The primary analytical vocabulary throughout the wiki is the TIME Framework: Tribal, Institutional, Market, and Emergent. Human societies have developed these four forms of coordination in sequence. Each solved problems the prior forms could not. Each externalized costs onto the substrate the next form would have to organize. All four now operate simultaneously in every geography on earth. A BioHub is a place where all four are active in one geography and coordinated across.
The Evolution of Coordination Nodes traces the physical structures each form has produced as it matured (sacred site, cathedral, skyscraper, bioregional hub) and places the BioHub within that sequence.
The economic architecture
Four bodies of work carry the economic architecture a functioning BioHub draws on.
Commitment Pooling describes the structure through which participants make binding forward promises to one another, and those promises become the basis for coordination and exchange. The theory draws on Burgess, Bergstra, and Ruddick. At the community level, the practice is operational in multiple bioregions through the Grassroots Economics protocol. At the bioregional level, pooling takes the form of coordinated landscape-scale commitments tendered into market instruments: water funds, performance-based bonds, and payment-for-ecosystem-services contracts. The BioHub is the coordination layer through which the two scales meet.
Bioregional Economics is the discipline concerned with designing regenerative, cooperatively owned, place-based economies within the carrying capacity of their landscapes. The material draws on Benjamin Life’s foundational definition, John Fullerton’s eight principles of regenerative capitalism, Kate Raworth’s boundary conditions, and the Bioregional Financing Facilities architecture developed by Dark Matter Labs and the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
Federated Cooperative Supply Chains examines how cooperatives within a bioregion retain and circulate value internally through federated structures. The Mondragón and SEKEM precedents are the primary case material.
Cosmo-Local Production carries the formulation from Michel Bauwens: share knowledge globally, adapt it locally, produce regeneratively in place, share the learning globally. The educational material on this site is the global-facing layer; the catchment restoration and cooperative production in each bioregion is the place-based layer.
The ecological science
Water Retention Landscapes is the operational science of catchment restoration. When rainfall lands on a functioning landscape (intact soil biology, mycorrhizal networks, riparian corridors, wetlands), the soil profile holds it and releases it as sustained baseflow over weeks or months. Degraded soils lose the same rainfall to flash runoff and evaporative loss. The section draws on the work of Kravčík, Jehne, Holzer, Weiss, Singh, Liu, Yeomans, Andrews, and Millison, and grounds the operational thesis in peer-reviewed evidence for specific biomes.
The carbon-silicon partnership
Two forms of intelligence are converging in bioregional work, and the relationship between them determines whether the work succeeds. The Carbon-Silicon Partnership page treats Silicon Intelligence (computational infrastructure) and Carbon Intelligence (lived, situated, relational knowledge) as differently shaped, differently paced, and irreducibly complementary. Neither can replace the other. The BioHub is the institution where they operate together.
Running this in your bioregion
This wiki is a guide for establishing your own. The four-template founding suite is where that guide sits. Start with How to Engage Your Bioregion for the bridge from the orientation above to the templates themselves.
Related pages
- From a Bioregion to a BioRegion
- The TIME Framework
- The Evolution of Coordination Nodes
- Commitment Pooling
- Bioregional Economics
- Federated Cooperative Supply Chains
- Cosmo-Local Production
- Carbon-Silicon Partnership
- Water Retention Landscapes
Sources
- Gladek, E. et al. (2026). BioHubs: A Pathway to Regional Resilience
- Life, B. (2026). An Introduction to Bioregional Economics (Part I)
Provenance
Extracted from Getting Started in a BioHub (Notion export, September 2026). The personal note and Overberg-specific framing in the source have been trimmed for the international-audience wiki, per extraction instructions. Section headings preserve the source’s organization; internal Notion links have been resolved to wikilinks against the current wiki structure or noted for future resolution.