Benjamin Life’s term for the institutional gap between the design principles of bioregional economics (which the discipline can now articulate) and the operating economies specific bioregions are attempting to build.
Extended definition
Life named the gap at the close of Part I of An Introduction to Bioregional Economics (August 2026), as a set of questions: who convenes the cooperatives and capitalizes their shared infrastructure, and what kind of institution can hold a bioregional economy in view without becoming the extraction it was built to end.
Part II, The Missing Middle of Bioregional Development (October 2026), fills the gap with two meso-scale institutions. The Bioregional Development Organization plans and capitalizes the bioregional economy as one system. The bioregional learning center is where the bioregion’s people grow the capacity to steward it. Life traces the gap to three ceilings in the field: dependence on philanthropy, capital composted into open loops, and the distance between institutional ticket sizes and the scale of projects on the ground.
In this wiki, the BioHub is the institution of the missing middle. A BioHub that carries capital functions is a Bioregional Development Organization in Life’s sense; see Bioregional Economics for the full treatment.
Related terms
Sources
- Life, B. (2026). An Introduction to Bioregional Economics (Part I)
- Life, B. (2026). The Missing Middle of Bioregional Development (Part II)
Provenance
Extracted from the BioHub Glossary CSV export (Notion, August 2026). Source cell classified as Term. Enriched 26 October 2026 from Life’s Part I and Part II: extended definition, sources and first_defined_in added. The sentence placing the BioHub in the missing middle is the wiki author’s.