Bioregional Financing Facilities

This project makes an argument for the decentralization of financial resource governance, and the organization of project portfolios for systemic change, to enable financial capital to reach the people and initiatives best positioned to contribute to global regeneration. It makes the case for the urgent development and piloting of a new structure to support this decentralization – the Bioregional Financing Facility (BFF) – which every bioregion on Earth could create to support its transition to a regenerative economy. BFFs can help align financial flows with living systems principles and Indigenous wisdom, to serve the thriving of all life on Earth.

Bioregional Financing Facilities

This project was a collaboration between Finance for Gaia, Dark Matter Labs Capital Systems, and the BFI Design Lab during 2023-24. The project involved the initial conceptualization, design, and research to support a wide range of novel Bioregional Financing Facilities including Bioregional Trusts, Bioregional Venture Studios, Bioregional Investment Companies, and Bioregional Banks. The project resulted in a landmark book Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet (The BioFi Project, Dark Matter Labs Capital Systems, and Buckminster Fuller Institute, 2024), which can be downloaded on this website or purchased in a print edition. The book has received significant acclaim:

“Our institutions are no longer serving us. We must give birth to institutions that support a new kind of economy, a new kind of philosophy, a new kind of ontology, a new way of being on this planet. And Bioregional Financing Facilities can play a critical role in supporting that transition.”

– Lynne Twist, Founder Pachamama Alliance

“The regenerative economy I imagine MUST be built on a foundation of bioregionally adapted, landscape scale regeneration. Bioregional Financing Facilities are the critical missing infrastructure. A brilliant and timely clarion call!”

– John Fullerton, Author of Regenerative Capitalism, and former Managing Director of JPMorgan

Bioregional Financing Facilities have twelve key high-level attributes:

  1. Aim to align with living systems principles and Indigenous wisdom
  2. Serve the realization of the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy
  3. Implement an inclusive and participatory governance structure that represents the bioregion
  4. Work to shift power imbalances
  5. Be transparent and enable empowered participation
  6. Leverage an integrated capital structure that embeds regenerative principles
  7. Treat growth and returns as a means, not an end
  8. Raise from mission aligned funders/investors
  9. Provide aggregation and matchmaking
  10. Apply an integrated approach to sensing and MRV
  11. Invest in storytelling
  12. Engage in partnerships, place-based citizen-stewardship, and the community of practice

The Bioregional Financing Facilities book was co-authored by Samantha Power and Leon Seefeld, with Advisors including Dr. Stuart Cowan, Edward West, Indy Johar, Raj Kalia, Jan Hania, Matthew Monahan, Karl Burkart, and Justin Adams.

On the strength of the Bioregional Financing Facilities research initiative and publication, The BioFi Project (a Fiscally Sponsored project of Buckminster Fuller Institute) was launched as an independent new project to help bioregions transition to regenerative economies by:

Supporting bioregions to design, build, and implement BFFs and complementary programs, including eco-credits and nature-based currencies

Supporting bioregions to design capital allocation programs to effectively support regeneration – including through participatory budgeting

Fostering the BioFi Community of Practice to support the development of BFFs around the world

Supporting bioregions to raise aligned financial resources for BFFs

Matching bioregions with the appropriate technical partners to support them in their transition to a regenerative economy

Providing tools and resources to support BFF implementation

Dark Matter Labs Capital Systems has launched a separate initiative to implement Bioregional Financing Facilities, and we anticipate rapid uptake of BFFs by other organizations as a critical tool for putting financial systems in the service of life at bioregional scale.