The Undercurrent: patterns & dynamics affecting the Bioregional (finance) field — part 2

The Undercurrent was a series of posts on LinkedIn, exploring several sticky patterns & dynamics to untangle in order for the bioregional (finance) field to thrive. This is part Two, providing the third and fourth diagnostic posts. Find part One here. A 2nd series turns the lens and takes inspiration from adjacent fields to scout promising directions.

**The Undercurrent (3): Nature finance and bioregional finance both respond to the ecological crisis. But they often diverge fundamentally on what value is.**

Over the past decade, institutional finance has increasingly positioned itself around ecological crises, resulting in new mechanisms & new markets.

Yet bioregional and regenerative landscape work largely watches from the outside. The lens I’m taking this time is root logics.

The mechanisms that attract(ed) the most attention tend to rest on three foundational assumptions, reflecting prevailing economic epistemology: 🔷 Comparability is required. Within this logic, to allocate resources you need a common unit. A carbon credit from a Scottish peatland and one from a Kenyan forest must mean the same thing: equivalence is what makes resource allocation legible to institutional systems. 🔷 Only what can be priced can be known. Value that cannot be standardised and compared across contexts doesn’t register as signal: the system has no mechanism to hold it. 🔷 Diversity is risk. Within this worldview, variation becomes something to manage rather than to preserve: this is what the theory of value structurally demands.

Bioregional work rests on almost opposite assumptions: 🥬 Place-specificity is the point. Value is inseparable from context: a watershed, community, and set of relationships built over decades. Non-equivalence isn’t a flaw, but makes the work real. 🥬 What matters most often resists measurement. Relational depth, cultural continuity, long-cycle stewardship: frequently the load-bearing elements of the work. 🥬 Diversity is the goal. Ecological and community diversity isn’t managed variation, but an actual outcome being worked toward.

The risk⚡is subtle: the prevailing epistemology just needs to quietly remain the dominant infrastructure long enough to pull the work (back) toward its own logic.

**The Undercurrent (4): When new bioregional structures carry old logics**

The most important unresolved question in bioregional finance right now: can it stay legible enough to survive, while remaining different enough to matter?

The emerging field of bioregional finance is building new structures: we see bioregional trusts emerging. Place-based investment vehicles. Community-governed funds.

Structures designed to hold a different theory of value: one that’s relational, place-based, and long-cycle. But structures are never neutral containers.

A trust is still a trust. A fund is still a fund. A development bank is still a development bank.

Each carries embedded logics (around e.g. governance, accountability, reporting, investment return) shaped by the cosmology they were designed within.

This is where the challenge goes deeper than epistemology: it becomes ontological.

A recent essay on relationalized finance by Bollier and Hulst puts it plainly: without adapting conventional finance and its implicit cosmology, such structures may risk superimposing an alien matrix of value onto the living systems they aim to support.

New plumbing. Same flow.

Which parts of what’s being built are genuinely new architecture? Which are new language around old load-bearing walls?

The honest answer from many practitioners may well be: we know the tension, but we don’t have another choice. Build it to look familiar enough, or it may never get off the ground.

That’s not a cop-out: it’s a bind. And I think it may perhaps be the most important unresolved question in the field right now: ⚡ whether bioregional finance can remain legible enough to survive, while staying different enough to matter