British founder and director of the Bioregional Learning Centre (BLC) in South Devon, UK. Since 2017 the BLC has been mapping South Devon for the green shoots of climate resilience. In September 2019 the centre launched its first leadership program for systems change, a Climate Resilience Learning Journey around the bioregion, which kick-started the Climate Resilience Strategy in South Devon. The strategy invites all sectors into co-design of a sustainable future for the bioregion.
Contribution
Carlisle’s work sits at the intersection of bioregional organizing and systems-change leadership. The BLC is a working instance of what the BioConomy corpus calls a Bioregional Learning Centre: a community-facing learning lab for real-world resilience, social and ecological regeneration, grounded in a specific place. Her approach to the South Devon bioregion demonstrates the pattern at landscape scale: mapping existing regenerative activity, convening multi-sector conversations, and building shared capacity for thinking in systems and across systems.
During the Covid-19 period Carlisle pivoted the BLC’s convening work online, hosting multi-sector conversations on regional resilience so that participants would be skilled in joined-up systems thinking when they regrouped after the crisis. This adaptation illustrates one of the practical realities the BioHub model faces: coordination nodes must sustain their convening function through disruptions, and the ones that survive are the ones that can shift modality without losing the relationships.
Carlisle is an Open Fellow at One Planet Business and a member of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) network. Her essay “Bioregioning Is a Way of Acting and Mobilising People in Their Locality” (published at The Alternative UK, June 2020) describes the South Devon approach in terms that parallel the BioConomy’s treatment of BioRegion formation: identifying the geography through ecological and watershed boundaries, mapping existing actors, and building coordination capacity from the ground up.
External links
- Bioregional Learning Centre
- DEAL member profile
- One Planet Business Open Fellow profile
- “Bioregioning Is a Way of Acting and Mobilising People in Their Locality” (The Alternative UK, June 2020)
Related pages
Provenance
Extracted from the BioHub Glossary CSV export (Notion, August 2026). Enriched 11 September 2026 from the Roam Research graph (MichaelHaupt): biographical detail, the BLC’s Climate Resilience Learning Journey and Strategy, Covid-era adaptation, DEAL and One Planet Business affiliations, the published essay, external links, and the analytical connections to the BioConomy corpus’s BioHub and BioRegion frameworks. Note: Carlisle’s name appears as both “Isabel” and “Isobel” across published sources; both spellings are carried in aliases.