Public policies to foster regenerative businesses

How policy-makers are transforming their economies by unlocking the potential of regenerative community-owned businesses

Posted by the DEAL Team on March, 27, 2023

Last updated: March, 10, 2026

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Overview

This tool - Regenerative Business Rising - was created to support anyone shaping public policies relating to business. It helps sets out a global policy vision, locally implementable according to context, that would enable creative, regenerative community ownership in any industry, for any stakeholder group. It aims to realise the distributive potential of community ownership and unlock its ability to pursue regenerative practices.

Who is it for?

This tool is for policy-makers, advocates and those who shape public policy at any level - local, provincial, national or transnational. It is particularly for those with the ambition to foster a business world that embodies regenerative and distributive goals in its deep design.

For those engaging directly with or within a business, DEAL has a separate Doughnut Design for Business tool - available as a core version (5 hours) and as a taster version (2 hours). DEAL's policy for business, which also relate to those tools, can be found here.

You can also read more about the concepts and ideas in that tool in our What Doughnut Economics means for business paper. We also have a short intro to enterprise design video here.

Role of public policy in shaping the deep design of businesses

Policy shapes the kinds of businesses that populate our economies. Around the world, leading policy-makers are already transforming cities and countries by unlocking the potential of businesses that put communities and the living world at the heart of their deep design. Through policies targeted at fostering such enterprises, they are helping populate their economies with resilient businesses that are committed to their communities and driven to achieve social and ecological goals. Ares of policy where governments are using the levers of policy to transform the ownership, governance and other aspects of the deep design of businesses include:

tax
public procurement
legal forms
access to finance
start-up support
industry policy
broader business regulations.

It is time to learn from these efforts and identify policy strategies equal to the challenges that communities face worldwide.

When policies help populate economies with businesses embodying ownership models that focus on regenerative goals and the empowerment of communities, a number of policy goals are achieved through such businesses:

Creating more resilient businesses that prioritise their communities through good times and through crises
Remaining embedded in and committed to their communities
Enabling the necessary investments and strategies for an ecological transition
Generating community wealth, better incomes and reduced inequality

Policy-makers around the world are now beginning to put in place new policies that are designed to enable these kinds of businesses to become central to the 21st Century economy.

What insights does this tool provide?

This tool includes examples of policies from around the world that are actively transforming the deep design of businesses to promote regenerative community ownership. A summary from the tool of these policies is provided in the table below. The tool also provides ambitious policy ideas for policy-makers at any level of government to begin the journey where they are.