BioFi, short for Bioregional Finance, refers to a set of strategies for capital allocation that honor the scales and boundaries found in natural ecosystems and see finance as a contribution to a web of right relation woven in their pattern. The term has gained particular momentum and memetic appeal with the establishment of the BioFi project, but its roots can be traced to various trends in the alterglobalization movement, including various forms of monetary and cultural localism, socio-political activations of permaculture and regenerative agriculture, and struggles for indigenous people’s sovereignty out of centuries old, ecologically-determined land boundaries.
The BioFi movement has a special power and salience in a period of escalating environmental collapse, institutional transition and technological peril known as the polycrisis. As large pools of capital are being mobilized to address these emergencies, activists, scholars and community members have long drawn attention to the danger of this institutional capital being deployed along the same channels and within the same frameworks that instigated this polycrisis in the first place. The BioFi Project has crystallized these concerns into an actionable language for capital allocation along lines that honor the dramatic contextual diversity of the threats to living systems we are facing today.
Problem Overview
Analysts from the BioFi movement emphasize two problems endemic to the allocation of capital meant to address the polycrisis: a) impoverished institutional infrastructure rife with perverse incentives and overly centralized and bureaucratized allocation strategies, and b) underresourced and ignored indigenous and regenerative organizations.
To understand the first, we should consider the three main relevant types of capital pools: investment capital, public grants, and philanthropy. Because each of the three exist in a mutually enforcing paradigm, their deployments are vulnerable to the double threat of systems-myopia, or allocation toward solutions that ignore systematic entanglements and feedback loops, and extractive intermediaries that are incentivized by the same logic that informs the very myopia of the first. The insecurity wrought by the former increases the justification for the latter, resulting in “cottage industries” of performative action. The problem is paradigmatic.
The BioFi project identifies four key features of this self-reinforcing paradigm:
- the separation of humans from the rest of life on Earth;
- the treatment of the Earth as a resource to be extracted from;
- the destruction of relational capital between all living beings, including through deepening inequality;
- and ultimately the loss of function of ecosystems and of the intelligence inherent in those ecosystems.
Related to this limited paradigm is the question of why regenerative organizations and other regenerative actors that operate at a bioregional level are subject to structural exclusion? As BioFi begins to address the problem, it becomes clear that the connective tissue depends on the opening up of institutional capital to a radically different way of valuing the world: hence the prominence of indigenous thinking in the BioFi project and other initiatives in the BioFi movement. But this opening will have to occur in environments of mutual legibility between the institutional capital pools and earth regenerators.
How do we value things as ends in themselves rather than as means to various institutional outcomes, especially when those outcomes are calibrated to measures of success that are frequently superficial - both in terms of shallow metric understandings of causality and the impoverished time-frames of election cycles and quarterly shareholder meetings? According to the BioFi thesis, centralized institutions can only stumble through the nuance and local contingency of living systems valued in themselves, while decentralized, ecologically embedded actors are able to address them on a pluralistic, experimental, and need-cognizant basis. What is needed is a layer that makes these organizations and actors available to the former while protecting them from the functional biases that animate them.
How BioFi Works
The operative mechanism in this new generation of Bioregional Finance, outlined by the BioFi project, is the Bioregional Financing Facility. This semi-formalized structure is intended to serve as the “connective tissue” between institutional resources and bioregionally situated regenerative actors as well as a communication primitive for bioregions to communicate and share problems between each other. In other words, they represent an attempt at establishing coherence to the decentralized work of actors without reducing their work to a global narrative or strategy.
Bioregional Financing Facility
The BioFi Project outlines four templates for Bioregional Financing Facilities. The framework suggests that these reinforce each other both as mechanistic compliments and in a shared operational ethic. For the latter, the BioFi Project has outlined the following priorities.
- Aim to align with living systems principles and Indigenous wisdom
- Serve the realization of the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy
- Implement an inclusive and participatory governance structure that represents the bioregion
- Work to shift power imbalances
- Be transparent and enable empowered participation
- Leverage an integrated capital structure that embeds regenerative principles
- Treat growth and returns as a means, not an end
- Raise capital from mission-aligned funders/investors
- Provide aggregation and matchmaking
- Apply an integrated approach to sensing and MRV
- Invest in storytelling
- Engage in partnerships, place-based citizen-stewardship, and the community of practice
Bioregional Trust
A foundational grant fund that can act as a locus of support for bioregional action that could eventually be a legal ground for experiments such as bio-regional eco-credit programs, Common Asset Trusts and Ecological Institutions. It is from this foundation, leveraging philanthropic and public grants (or more exotic mechanisms like opt-in bioregional tithing), that a Bioregional Venture Studio, Bioregional Investment Company, and Bioregional Bank are launched.
Bioregional Venture Studio
A non-profit, public benefit corporation, co-operative, steward-owned entity, or DAO that supports the development of a cohort of synergistic regenerative organizations to drive systems change. These organizations provide “dealflow” for the Investment Company.
Bioregional Investment Company
A public benefit corporation, co-operative, steward-owned entity, or DAO that develops a portfolio of Systemic Investment Funds and Bioregional Regeneration Bonds. It leverages an integrated capital approach, aggregates portfolios of high impact projects or businesses.
Bioregional Bank
A bank that provides low-interest loans, microloans, lines of credit, and technical assistance to aligned organizations. It can also provide retail banking services to individuals and can develop and issue a complementary or nature-based currency.
This fourfold path presents a point by point roadmap for transplanting institutional capital into local hands, effectively bridging the gap between legacy patterns of allocation to new, community grounded finance flows. This will be accomplished, it goes without saying, within the cultural and ecological contexts of the bioregions themselves; hence, no single true embodiment of these institutions exist, but rather community embedded projects that have come to fulfill one or another of the functions described in their own journeys (see Case Studies).
Relevant Mechanisms
Given that the Bioregional Financing Facilities exist in an atmosphere of local community action and economy that is heralded as a distinct break from the legacy institutional modes, it’s important to consider the extitutional mechanisms that have and will continue to inform the ability of communities to self organize and self govern. Some of them include:
- Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and Web3-based eco-credits
- (Digital) Nature-based Currencies
- Local Market Networks & Bioregional Vouchers
- Participatory grant-making through Quadratic and Conviction Voting
- Quadratic Funding and Equity Crowdfunding as proxies for capital allocation
- Place-based Bioregional Tithing, voluntary taxation, and Business Improvement Districts
- Advance Market Commitments for bioregional regeneration
- Profit Pooling and whole-economy health as triggers for investor returns
Risks and Opportunities
The BioFI playbook and other elements of this memetic center inhabit a space rife with potential contradiction. What are the risks of standardizing across bioregions? At worst, it could represent an opportunity for cooptation or restaging of the very elements the bioregional thesis is trying to counteract: after all, wouldn’t the bioregional ethos be to discover and iterate solutions for resourcing on a hyper-contingent basis?
On the other hand, the development and sharing of minimum viable models for resourcing and expanding mindful, place-based infrastructure is the challenge that needs to be overcome if those cultures are to scale in a manner that’s competitive with the more extractive, easily globalized initiatives that have informed the polycrisis in the first place. Bioregional Finance and - to the extent that it has been able to focalize the momentum around this strategic frame - the BioFi Project are located at the center of this nuance, where the threat of cooptation inherent in a formalized global strategy is only exceeded by the threat of doing nothing at all.
Resources & Further Reading
- The BioFi Project Website
- The Bioregional Financing Facilities Book
- Regenerate Cascadia Website
- Watershed Commons Department of Bioregions Website
- Salmon Nation Trust Website
- Open Civics Website
- “Bioregionalism: A Model for a Self-Sufficient and Democratic Economy” by Tristan Bove Article
- The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg Book