The BFF Glossary

The quality of a system, entity, or process that allows it to not only withstand — but actually benefit and grow stronger from — stress, volatility, and uncertainty. Unlike fragile systems, which break under stress, or robust systems, which withstand stress without changing, anti-fragile systems thrive and improve in response to challenges and disruptions.

A holistic and interconnected approach to revitalizing and restoring ecosystems, biodiversity, and cultural practices in a given spatial context. It recognizes the interdependence of nature and culture, emphasizing the importance of Indigenous and traditional knowledge and practices in stewarding ecosystems.

Biodiversity or biological diversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth. Biodiversity is a measure of variation at the genetic (genetic variability), species (species diversity), and ecosystem (ecosystem diversity) level.¹

¹UNEP: What is biodiversity?

A region defined by unique physical characteristics (climate, topography), ecological characteristics (such as soil, flora, fauna, and funga), cultural characteristics (such as language, art, and identity), and their interconnections. There are many differing definitions of the scale and boundaries of bioregions,² and this book celebrates this diversity as a critical insight about the lack of any firm boundaries in ecosystems and the need to work with neighbors in bioregional organizing.

²One Earth: What is a bioregion? 22 ways to define a bioregion

A community-owned institution that applies a participatory, transparent, and place-based approach to driving the decentralization of financial resource governance, design of project portfolios for systemic change, and the transition to a regenerative economy. While a BFF specializes in facilitating the flow of financial capital between regenerative projects, community members, and investors, it also works in close relationship with a Bioregional Hub to facilitate the flow of all capital types (e.g social, intellectual, cultural) in holistic support of bioregional regeneration. See section 4., Designing and Implementing Bioregional Financing Facilities, of the book for a detailed discussion, templates, and case studies.

A community-led institution that functions as a gathering place (physical and/or virtual), resource center, and facilitator of various regeneration-related activities, initiatives, and networks within a bioregion. While Bioregional Hubs can offer educational and capacity building programs, much like Bioregional Learning Centers do, their focus extends to facilitating the flow of multiple forms of capital (intellectual, social, cultural, etc.). They cohere and strengthen a synergistic bioregional collaboration network by fostering connections and partnerships, and catalyzing projects and initiatives that align with the Bioregional Regeneration Strategy. See section 3.3, Bioregional Hubs, of the book for a detailed description.

An educational hub for gathering and synthesizing knowledge about local ecology and culture.³ Centers typically focus on education, research, and skill-building related to the specific ecological, cultural, and social aspects of a bioregion. They offer various programs, workshops, mutual learning exchanges, and courses that focus on topics such as ecology, permaculture, sustainable living practices, Indigenous knowledge, and local history. The primary goal is to provide opportunities for individuals and communities to deepen their understanding of the unique characteristics and challenges of their bioregion while equipping them with the knowledge and skills necessary for regenerative living and stewardship in place.

³Joe Brewer: What is a Bioregional Learning Center?

A team of local stakeholders that initiates a bioregional regeneration and governance process, activates other stakeholders, builds networks of relationality and trust, and facilitates the collective regeneration efforts. See section 3.1, Bioregional organizing and value creation, of the book for a detailed discussion.

A co-created, 20-100+ year or multigenerational plan for regenerating a particular bioregion, including a guide to the worldviews, values, processes, and principles recommended in approaching the work. Strategies are ideally built upon comprehensive mapping and systemic analysis and employ long-term thinking. See section 3.1, Bioregional organizing and value creation, of the book for a detailed discussion.

A program through which citizens residing or organizations operating in the bioregion opt to “tithe” by donating a certain amount annually or monthly (based on their income or profits) to the Bioregional Trust to support regeneration of the bioregion they are tasked with stewarding. This program recognizes that while all humans are meant to be stewards of the lands and waters of their place, some are better placed to do this work directly, while others can support them with financial resources. Inspiration can be taken from the Ohlone Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and its calculator for the voluntary Shuumi Land Tax.⁵

⁵The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust received a $20 million Shuumi Land Tax contribution in early 2024 - the single largest known cash gift to a Native land trust in history.

A socio-political and ecological philosophy that argues for the organization of human societies based on natural ecological or biocultural regions, or "bioregions." Bioregionalism advocates for the alignment of economic activity, ecological management, and governance with the natural systems and cultures of the region. Bioregions can be seen as the natural units of place-based regeneration, enabling the interweaving of life’s flows across species, the physical territory, and the cultural meanings of place. Bioregionalism suggests that the invisible and visible regenerative efforts occurring across multiple scales (individual, family, neighborhood, community, organization, ecoregion, global) can be anchored and organized in large, bioculturally coherent landscapes that federate through affinity, solidarity, and reciprocity to fulfill planetary potential.⁴

⁴This is articulated in the vision, mission, and goals of the Regenerative Communities Network.

The thin life-supporting stratum of Earth’s surface, extending from a few kilometers into the atmosphere to the deep-sea vents of the ocean. It is composed of living organisms and nonliving factors from which the organisms derive energy and nutrients. The biosphere supports all life on Earth, estimated at 3 to 30 million species of plants, animals, fungi, single-celled prokaryotes such as bacteria, and single-celled eukaryotes such as protozoans.⁶

⁶Britannica: Biosphere

A myopic perspective that ignores the multiple interdependent socio-ecological system crises that we face to focus only on carbon emissions, and/or focuses solely on carbon emissions reductions as the key climate change response.⁷

⁷Phrase coined by Dr Jan Konietzko, Maastricht University.

A term coined by Buckminster Fuller used to describe how benefits from one well-designed change in a system can create enabling conditions for other beneficial changes.

(also referred to as commons) – A type of resource that is collectively owned, used, or engaged with by a group of people. Commons can range from local resources like forests, fisheries, and urban spaces, to global resources like the biosphere, atmosphere, digital networks, and data. Elinor Ostrom's work challenged the traditional notion that commons are inevitably subject to degradation or overuse ("the tragedy of the commons"), and instead demonstrated through empirical studies that communities are capable of developing effective rules and institutions to sustainably manage and govern commons over the long term.⁸ “Commoning” and “re-commoning” are also coming into increasing use as verbs to describe the practice of forming and governing new commons or recovering historical commons from a present privatized state.

⁸Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

The processes of gathering, facilitating connection between, and empowering community towards a shared purpose and vision. The Bioregional Weaving Labs consortium outlines five core Weaving Practices: Helping systems see and sense themselves; Cultivating trust-based relationship; Aligning on a shared purpose and vision; Facilitating collective (un)learning; Fostering (experimental) action.⁹

⁹Bioregional Weaving Labs: Weaving

A form of currency or exchange medium that operates alongside the national currency system, providing a means of transaction and value exchange within a specific community or network. They are designed to complement rather than replace national currencies and “to facilitate transactions that otherwise wouldn’t occur, linking otherwise unused resources to unmet needs, and encouraging diversity and interconnections that otherwise wouldn’t exist.”¹⁰ Complementary currencies can take various forms including local currencies, time-based currencies, rewards programs, or digital/blockchain-based tokens.

¹⁰Bernard Lietaer: Scientific Evidence of Why Complementary Currencies are Necessary to Financial Stability

An approach to collective decision-making where individuals continuously express their preferences for the proposals they wish to support. They may change their preferences at any time, but the longer they maintain their support for a specific proposal, the greater the "strength" of their conviction becomes. This gives community members with consistent preferences more influence than short-term participants who may only seek to sway a single vote.¹¹

¹¹Jeff Emmett: Conviction Voting: A Novel Continuous Decision Making Alternative to Governance

The distribution of decision-making authority and management responsibilities away from a centralized or top-down authority and toward a larger group of diverse representatives, aiming to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness of information processing, coordination, and decision-making (notably, resource allocation).

Attestations (i.e. validations) about ecological state which prove regeneration is occurring, has occurred, or will occur. It is our recommendation that eco-credits are based on community-developed and governed definitions of regeneration that are rooted in local context and include a composition of ecological factors (rather than a single, non-local parameter, such as carbon).¹²

¹²Adapted from input from Region Foundation.

The ability of an ecosystem to support and maintain ecological processes and a diverse community of organisms.¹³

¹³IPBES: ecological integrity

A relatively large area of land or water that contains a geographically distinct assemblage of plant and animal communities. Ecoregions can generally be understood as encompassing biome subtypes (e.g. a grassland prairie biome can include multiple different grassland ecoregions — tall grass, short grass, etc.).

A transition area between two ecosystems where they meet and integrate. It may be narrow or wide, and it may be local (the zone between a field and forest) or regional (the transition between forest and grassland ecosystems). An ecotone may appear on the ground as a gradual blending of the two ecosystems across a broad area, or it may manifest itself as a sharp boundary line.¹⁴

¹⁴Wikipedia: Ecotone (“ecosystem” has been substituted for “biological community”)

“Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” It is these “simple interactions” – from how we relate to the thoughts in our own heads, to how we show up in our relationships, to how we exist as local communities – that create the patterns that give rise to our ecosystems and societies.¹⁵

¹⁵adrienne maree brown: Emergent Strategy

The segment of the global economy composed of institutions and markets that facilitate the flow of funds between savers, borrowers, and speculators managing financial assets and liabilities. It differs from the real sector, which involves the production and exchange of tangible goods and services.

A trend in which financial instruments and markets exert disproportionate influence over real economic activities and policy, prioritizing short-term speculative gains for the financial sector over long-term productivity and health in the real sector.

A pattern comprising parts, each of which is a reduced-scale copy of the whole, displaying self-similarity across scales. In nature, fractals can be observed in patterns such as snowflakes, mountain ranges, and the branching of trees, blood vessels, and watersheds.

Introduced in the early 1970s by James E. Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, the Gaia Hypothesis posits that Earth and its biological systems behave as a single, global entity with closely controlled self-regulatory negative feedback loops that keep the conditions on the planet within boundaries that are favorable to life. This way of looking at global ecology and evolution differs from the classical picture of ecology as a biological response to a menu of physical conditions.¹⁶

¹⁶ScienceDirect: Gaia Hypothesis

produced, growing, living, or occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment.¹⁷

¹⁷Merriam-Webster: Indigenous

A term holding immense complexity that is best defined within specific context.¹⁸ However, for general interpretation throughout this book, we suggest the term be understood as members “of a community retaining memories of life lived sustainably on a land-base, as part of that land-base,”¹⁹ particularly peoples practicing non-colonial knowledge systems rooted in relationships of reciprocity with more-than-human life, and as a term of self-identification used by those with “a special relationship with their traditional territory and an experience of subjugation and discrimination under a dominant cultural model.”²⁰ Note: In some geographic contexts, ‘First Nations’ is used as a more specific term.²¹

¹⁸We encourage great care with this term and caution against simplistic categorizations that ignore historical contexts of interrelatedness between peoples, and between all peoples and the entire land-base of Earth. We encourage deep listening and relationship-building with sources of Indigenous knowledge and dialogue in your contexts.

¹⁹This quotation is sourced from Tyson Yunkaporta’s book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, which is an excellent resource for engaging with the depth and complexity of this term.

²⁰Wikipedia: Indigenous peoples

²¹’First Nations’ is often used to identify Indigenous peoples of Canada (who are neither Inuit nor Métis) and to identify people with familial heritage from, and membership in, the ethnic groups that lived in Australia before British colonization.

For this book we have chosen to use the terms “investment” and “investing” to describe all processes of providing financial resources. This builds on an understanding that all forms of financial capital provision (equity, debt, donations, grant-making, etc.) ideally yield returns, as in the traditional notion of “investment.” However, sometimes these investments are designed to return financial capital and at other times additional or other forms of capital (see “Multi-capital”). “Investment” can also be used to describe the provision of non-financial capital, although this book does not apply this meaning.

Ilya Prigogine, a renowned theoretical physicist and chemist, used the concept of "islands of coherence" to describe emergent phenomena in complex systems, particularly localized regions within a complex system where coherence or order emerges spontaneously amidst overall disorder or randomness. These islands of coherence are characterized by temporary stability or organization that arises due to nonlinear interactions and feedback processes within the system.

Encompasses a complex and interconnected understanding of relationships, identity, and responsibilities within human and more-than-human communities. It is not merely a biological or legal concept, but encompasses spiritual, cultural, familial, and historical dimensions.

Also referred to with hashtag #LandBack, is a decentralized campaign by Indigenous Australians, Indigenous peoples in Canada, Native Americans in the United States, other Indigenous peoples, and allies alike, that seeks to reestablish Indigenous sovereignty, with political and economic control of their ancestral lands. Land Back promotes a return to communal land ownership of traditional and unceded Indigenous lands and rejects colonial concepts of real estate and private land ownership.²²

²²Wikipedia: Land Back

Having an intentional, embodied, and perhaps spiritual connection and responsibility to specific lands, ecology, and place-based culture. In contrast, many people in modern culture may experience a “placelessness” – a disconnection from geographic roots due to factors like globalization, technological change, and dominant culture that considers humans as separate from nature.

Living systems, as contrasted with nonliving complex systems – such as the stock market, computer simulations, or car traffic patterns –  are characterized by the following set of key features: complexity, self-organization, interdependence, nested hierarchies, dynamic balance, and the emergent properties of cognition, adaptation, and autopoiesis – the capability of a system to produce and maintain itself by producing its own parts.²³

²³Fritjof Capra & Pier Luigi Luisi: The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision

A process that ensures accuracy, reliability, and transparency in reporting and measurements. The goal of MRV is to verify that the data and information presented in reports, statements, or performance measurements are truthful, consistent, and compliant with applicable standards and regulations.

A phrase that intentionally values all living beings and elements of the natural world as interconnected and integral to life. This concept emphasizes the agency, consciousness, and relational significance of non-human entities.

A framework that acknowledges and values different forms of capital beyond traditional financial capital. A wide diversity of multi-capital frameworks and definitions – including Indigenous concepts – have been proposed in recent years to offer language for breaking out of the perception that money is the only form of capital flowing around and through us.

The stocks of natural resources and ecosystems that provide essential services and benefits to Gaia, society, local economies, and the global economy. These assets include forests, wetlands, fisheries, clean air and water, biodiversity, and other elements of the natural environment that contribute to the well-being of life and economic prosperity.

Perhaps an undefinable term (e.g. where does it end?) it is mostly used in this book to refer to the organic world (plants, fungi, animals (including humans), ecosystems) as well as world features (hydrology, geology, climate) that western science does not generally consider organic or alive, yet are being increasingly recognized as interdependent with the organic world (see Gaia Hypothesis). Within the context of other knowledge systems, it includes categories such as Mother Earth and systems of life, and it is often viewed as inextricably linked to humans, not as a separate entity.²⁴

²⁴IPBES: nature

A type of complementary currency that bases its value on the health and vitality of the local ecosystems – the ecological wealth – in a given bioregion. While most currencies in circulation today are no longer linked to physical assets, such as gold, communities deploying these new currencies can use natural capital as a reserve asset to mint the financial capital needed to protect ecosystems and support the livelihoods of their local stewards.²⁵

²⁵Inspired by Open Earth Foundation: Nature Based Currencies

Multi-stakeholder cooperatives or commons-based institutions responsible for the management and provision of certain public goods, common assets, or services that were once the responsibility of state governments, which instead provide funding and performance evaluation to partner states.²⁶

²⁶P2P Foundation Wiki: Partner State

Where geographic reality and human culture intersect. It is the foundation for culture and economy.²⁷

²⁷Credit to Capital Institute

A scientific framework that presents a set of nine biophysical thresholds, “within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come.” Crossing boundaries increases the risk of generating large-scale abrupt or irreversible ecological changes.²⁸

²⁸Stockholm Resilience Center: Planetary Boundaries

“A time of great disagreement, confusion, or suffering that is caused by many different problems happening at the same time so that they together have a very big effect,” (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.). Polycrisis is often used interchangeably with “Metacrisis”, although some assert that “meta-” offers a preferable distinction by denoting the interdependence (rather than mere multiplicity) of crises and the worldviews/values that may be generating these crises.²⁹

²⁹Rowson, Jonathan: Prefixing the World

In economics, a “public good" refers to anything that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous, meaning people cannot be barred access, and one person's use doesn't degrade another’s.³⁰ Street lights, public databases, and open-source patents or code are all examples. Public goods are different from common assets, which can be rivalrous and made excludable through governance.

³⁰Wikipedia: Public good (economics)

By allocating funds based on a quadratic formula that magnifies the impact of many small investments from the community (similar to crowdfunding) through a so-called ‘matching pool’ that is resourced by larger capital providers, quadratic funding encourages widespread participation and fosters a diverse array of projects that resonate with local communities. Projects that receive a given amount of community funding from a broader base of individuals receive more match funding than those that receive the given amount from only a few community investors.³⁹

³⁹Quadratic Funding (QF) — Unlocking the power of community funding. See (Buteren et al. 2020) for the seminal articulation.

A method  of collective decision-making where individuals assign votes to reflect both the direction and intensity of their preferences. Participants can allocate more votes to express stronger support for specific options, allowing them to "purchase" additional votes on a particular matter, thereby aligning the voting outcome with the highest willingness to pay, rather than solely the preference of the majority. Payments for votes can be made using either artificial or real currencies, such as voting tokens distributed equally among voting members or fiat and complementary currencies with actual economic exchange value.⁴⁰

⁴⁰Lalley and Weyl: Quadratic Voting: How Mechanism Design Can Radicalize Democracy

Jan Hania (Tuwharetoa, Raukawa-ki-teTonga, Te Atiawa of Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Principal of Strategy Development for Biome Trust) uplifts the “R values” of relationality, reciprocity, responsibility, respect, reverence, regeneration, redistribution, and reconnection – noting that language must be contextualized and place-based.³¹ The authors also uplift re-membering, restorying, rewilding, and rematriation.

³¹The Regeneration Will Be Funded (Podcast): Jan Hania

the part of the global economy that produces goods and services, rather than the part that consists of financial institutions and services.

The process of a system regaining its needed energies, resources, and relationships to vitalize and sustain. Contrasted with “sustainability”, which is oriented towards preserving and minimizing negative impacts, regeneration is oriented towards restoring and revitalizing systems that have been degraded.

The individuals, communities, organizations, and networks actively engaging in biocultural regeneration efforts. The specifier “on-the-ground” refers to those working in consistent, embodied, and intimate relationship with ecosystems and landscapes.

The outcomes (normally assumed to be positive, but could include negative) generated for investors, stakeholders, and human and more-than-human community across multiple forms of capital as a result of investments or actions.

As an aspirational quality or state of relationality that can only be encountered in a unique web of relations and biocultural understanding, it is not possible to offer a comprehensive and specific definition of this term. Generally, however, “right relationship” connotes a harmonious way of relating that is active, reciprocal, consensual, and sustainable (or regenerative) across dimensions of past, present, and future, with respect to humans, more-than-human-life, lands, and waters. The term is most often used to refer to Indigenous ways of relating. Therefore, we recommend learning about relationality directly from Indigenous sources and relationships, as translation across languages and worldviews risks eroding its essential meaning.³³

³³For an in-depth academic discussion of relationality from Indigenous perspectives, please see Matt Wildat & Daniel Voth: Indigenous relationality: definitions and methods

The recognition that our ecosystems – including trees, oceans, animals, and mountains – have rights just as human beings have rights. Rather than treating nature as property under the law, rights of nature acknowledges that nature in all its life forms has the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles. And we – the people – have the legal authority and responsibility to enforce these rights on behalf of ecosystems. The ecosystem itself can be named as the injured party, with its own legal standing rights, in cases alleging rights violations.³²

³²Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature: What are the Rights of Nature?

A corporate ownership structure that presents an alternative to shareholder value primacy. It ensures that companies prioritize their long-term purpose over short-term profits – by legally enshrining two principles of Self-Determination and Purpose-Orientation.³⁵

³⁵Purpose Economy: What's steward-ownership?

The responsible and ethical relating, tending, and nurturing of land, resources, and ecosystems for the benefit of present and future generations of human and more-than- human communities. Stewardship emphasizes a holistic approach that prioritizes the well-being of the entire ecological system over individual ownership rights, focusing on sustainability, resilience, and regeneration of natural capital.³⁴

³⁴A note of caution for Spanish speakers: steward is often translated as ‘mayordomo’ – a term originating from colonial structures of domination and control of land and people. ‘Cuidador/a’ or ‘guardiano/a’ are closer to the intended meaning.

A holistic narrative that integrates the history, ecology, culture, and potential of a specific location, guiding sustainable design and development processes rooted in community stewardship and alignment with living systems principles. Note: Story of Place® refers to a specific educational concept and service offering of the Regenesis Group.³⁶

³⁶Regenesis Group: Story of Place

The ongoing accumulation of knowledge, practice, and belief about relationships between living beings in a specific ecosystem that is acquired by Indigenous people over hundreds or thousands of years through direct contact with the environment, handed down through generations, and used in life-sustaining ways. It encompasses the world view of a people, which includes ecology, spirituality, human and animal relationships, and more.³⁷

³⁷U.S. National Park Service: Traditional Ecological Knowledge

The recognition that complex systems do not exist in single contexts, but rather are formed between multiple contexts that overlap in living communication and among living systems. “Warm Data” can be defined as: Transcontextual information about the interrelationships that integrate a complex system.³⁸

³⁸The International Bateson Institute: Warm Data Labs

True wealth is not merely money in the bank. It must be defined and managed in terms of the well-being of the whole, achieved through the harmonization of multiple kinds of wealth or capital, including social, cultural, living, and experiential. It must also be defined by a broadly shared prosperity across all of these varied forms of capital. The whole is only as strong as the weakest link.⁴⁰

⁴⁰Capital Institute: The Field Guide to a Regenerative Economy

Weaving is the practice of cultivating meaningful relationships, within, between and across socio-ecological systems. It connects people, projects, and places in synergistic ​and purposeful ways to help cohere fragmented change-making efforts. It seeks to strengthen the socio-ecological fabric and the system’s resilience by addressing the vital and relational aspects of trust, common meaning, capacity for learning, and capacity for self-organization.⁴²

⁴²Hussain et al.: Social-Ecological Resilience: ‘Weaving’ to scale Nature-based Solutions

In contrast to the current internet era (Web2) characterized by centralized platforms and services where user data is controlled by a few large corporations, Web3 represents an emerging internet that is decentralized, enabled by blockchain technology, where users have greater control over their data, identities, and interactions through peer-to-peer networks and protocols.

“A set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic makeup of our world.”⁴³

⁴³Definition by James Sire, referenced in D.C. Wahl: Design for human and planetary health: a transdisciplinary approach to sustainability