Is a ‘bioregional financing facility’ an oxymoron?
Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to bring together two worlds (or worldviews) that maybe don’t belong together. I’ll try to explain.
Bioregioning is a beautiful thing, where a community of people and non-human lifeforms connect in place and ask very openly and profoundly: ‘what is this place, what has it been, and what can it become?’
It is a process of interaction, reflection and collective visioning. It is also a process of action: reshaping the food system, rewilding, creating new healthcare concepts, rebuilding communities to avert loneliness and polarisation. But it is action at the speed of trust and rooted in multi-generational pathways to change.
A ‘bioregional financing facility’ is conceived to bring financial flows to those people and initiatives that are building more resilient bioregions. A bioregional financing facility has an interface function between global and national financiers and place-based ‘changemakers’. The idea is to aggregate capital and bring it in service of bioregional processes.
And this is where it gets hard.
Through the ResiliAnce Partnership, Wire Group and others are prototyping bioregional financing facilities in three bioregions. We are working intimately with bioregional partners on the one hand, and philanthropists and investors on the other. And what I find myself doing is trying to implore the bioregional partners to “show progress” and to “create an initial portfolio of initiatives by Q1”. While on the other hand convincing financiers about the importance of providing unconditional and patient capital.
And sometimes I push harder on the bioregional partners to ‘maintain momentum’ because I worry that the capital on offer is not as unconditional and patient as I would hope. This effectively means imposing ‘old world’ values on people that are trying to create a new world that beats to the rhythm of nature and is governed by relationships rather than transactions. It feels counterproductive and unfair.
Yet this is probably the reality, and the value, of the work that we are doing. We are bridging two worlds and from the friction that this creates, hopefully something beautiful will emerge. The bioregioning movement may benefit from being challenged to think about how they can make essential bioregional initiatives financially sustainable. At the same time, we need to challenge philanthropists and investors to think about their role as owners of capital and invite them to imagine a world where money is the energy to create a more resilient (and lower-risk!) future, flowing organically based on shared vision and values rather than KPIs like ‘return on capital’ and ‘realised impact’.
Most important of all, we need to bring bioregional changemakers and capital owners together so they can learn from each other and weave a new financial architecture. To this end we are creating BFF Funder Sounding Boards in the three regions in which we are working.
