What Is BioFi?
Photo is of currencies designed by David Haenke for the Ozarks bioregion and North America.
“When an economic system actively destroys what we love, isn’t it time for a different system?”
-Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry
At its core, BioFi is a framework that organizes the flow of financial capital and other multi-capital resources to the regeneration of ecosystems, culture, and communities in bioregions. More broadly, BioFi is also a philosophy rooted in and informed by: systems thinking, bioregionalism, living systems science, Indigenous ways of knowing, permaculture, the rights of nature, regenerative economics, nonviolence, decolonization, and social justice.
BioFi aims to catalyze the transformation of financial and economic systems from those that are:
- global,
- homogenized,
- abstract,
- and rooted in a reductionist paradigm
to those that are:
- place-based,
- community-owned and governed,
- relational,
- anti-fragile,
- aligned with living systems principles and Indigenous wisdom,
- and rooted in a Gaian (see the Gaia hypothesis) or whole systems worldview.
There are a wide range of BioFi-aligned tools, templates, mechanisms, and approaches – a selection of which are laid out in the 2024 book Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet. However, this is merely a sampling intended to provide definition to BioFi. There is a diverse global movement afoot of countless organizations and communities working in alignment with the patterns and principles of BioFi.
Central to the BioFi approach are the following objectives:
- Decentralize financial resource governance
- Organize systemic portfolios of projects (across space, time, sectors, communities, and organizations)
- Deploy investment to catalyze the transition to bioregional, regenerative economies (that are less dependent on external financial capital and financial capital in general over time).
- Plan geographically in alignment with geological, ecological, and cultural patterns (rather than political boundaries)
- Work at nested geographical and systemic scales
- Work across long time horizons (in order to shift the ecology, culture, economy, and governance in a place to those aligned with living systems patterns and principles)
- Embrace complexity and relationality
- Work with the regenerative potential of life (see Capra and Kauffman et al.)
To dive deeper into the design philosophy of BioFi, check out the BioFi Design Principles.