From the Greek oikonomia: the management of a household. The root meaning is the ordered care of a shared living arrangement, including what is grown, stored, shared, repaired, and passed on. In this older sense, an economy is inseparable from the place it inhabits and the people who inhabit it.
The modern usage narrowed the term. From roughly the eighteenth century onward, “the economy” came to name the sphere of monetized exchange: markets, prices, production, trade, employment, and the aggregate measures (GDP, output, growth rates) that track flow through that sphere. This is the meaning carried by mainstream economic theory from Smith and Ricardo forward and by the institutions built on it. Value in this sense is measured by what moves, what is exchanged, and what is priced.
The narrowing produced real gains during the industrial acceleration. It also left much of what the older meaning covered outside the frame: unpaid care, ecological function, cultural inheritance, and the health of the substrate on which exchange depends. Contemporary economic thought has begun to notice what was excluded, but the dominant measures still track flow rather than retention.
BioConomy restores the household frame at the scale of a living region. It treats the bioregion as the oikos under management and measures the economy by what the household retains: soil, water, biodiversity, skill, community capacity, cultural coherence. The word choice is deliberate, because BioConomy isn’t a modification of the modern economy. It is a return to the older meaning of the term, updated for a phase in which the household in question is a living system with limits.
Related terms
- Economy vs BioConomy
- Throughput Economics
- Regenerative Economics
- BioConomy
- BioPlace
- BioRegion
- BioHub
- BioStack
Provenance
Extracted from the BioHub Glossary CSV export (Notion, August 2026). Source cell classified as Term. First-pass entry: the extended definition, contrast with adjacent terms, and usage-in-context sections require enrichment from the underlying project documents on a subsequent pass.