The economic framework organized around the health of living systems over time. Value is measured by what a system retains and regenerates: soil, water, biodiversity, community capacity, cultural coherence, and the ecological function that supports all of them. The framework treats the economy as a subsystem of the biosphere rather than the biosphere as a subsystem of the economy.
Regenerative Economics extends Retention Economics along four dimensions the historical retention tradition lacked. It incorporates ecological limits, drawing on the planetary boundaries framework (Rockström, Steffen, Richardson) and the physical constraints of energy return and material throughput. It incorporates commons governance, drawing on Elinor Ostrom’s empirical work on how communities sustainably self-govern shared resources. It operates at bioregional rather than national scale, treating watersheds, foodsheds, and ecosystems as the relevant unit of coordination. And it treats coordination as primarily cooperative rather than competitive, drawing on symbiogenesis (Margulis) and mature-ecosystem dynamics (Sahtouris).
Regenerative Economics is the framework structurally fit for the deceleration and maturation phase of the industrial S-curve . It restores the older meaning of oikonomia (household management - see economy) at the scale of a living region. BioConomy is one coordination architecture within this broader framework, focused on the practical question of how bioregions build the institutions, currencies, and stewardship arrangements that let regenerative logic become operational.
Related terms
- Prosocial
- Throughput Economics
- Regenerative
- Regenerative Capitalism
- Planetary Boundaries
- EROI
- Deceleration Phase
- The BioConomy Developmental Arc
- Throughput, Retention, Regenerative: The Three Lineages
Sources
- Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons
- Richardson et al. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances 9, eadh2458
- Brockway et al. (2019). Estimation of global final-stage EROI for fossil fuels. Nature Energy
- Tainter, J. (1988). The Collapse of Complex Societies
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.