Public policies to foster regenerative businesses
How policy-makers are transforming their economies by unlocking the potential of regenerative community-owned businesses
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.
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This tool is licensed under a Creative Commons BY SA 4.0 license. For full details visit our Licensing Rules. 
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Member
Kathryn Alexander, MA
Spokane, Washington, United States of America
Kathryn is the Chief Strategist for SoilSmart–SoilWise.org as well as a consultant, author and educator, an expert in ethics, systems thinking and change. Kathryn’s early work combined her interest in change, systems thinking, ethics and values, themes that continue to this day. Kathryn’s sense that Western culture was imbalanced in some way drove her to seek deeper understanding by looking into the foundation (nature), and driving forces at work that clarified the effective application of ethics and values she saw expressed around her. Kathryn’s shift to nature as the expert provided a strong framework for effective and harmonious change, in sync with nature – the largest system. The discovery of the biotic pump and the meta crisis we are facing, drove Kathryn to shift her focus into the education and application of this new systems understanding of how rain is formed and how the planet has been cooling itself since the beginning. Designated as a “Woman to Watch’ in Sustainability in 2012 by the Boulder Weekly, she was previously on the faculty of the Sustainable Business Practices Program at the University of Colorado Boulder, Regis University and the Entrepreneur Community Online teaching strategy, organizational change, systems theory, business psychology, and work team development. Her published work includes “What’s It Mean, Shifting to Green? Fascinated with organizational change, Kathryn was an early student of systems thinking creating study groups for the Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge and studying with Fritjof Capra, starting in the 80s. Her change work showed her the impact of tacit values on leadership and management styles. Kathryn developed the model Birds of a Feather™ and a tool for assessing organizational culture strategically, Strategic Leadership Assessment™, and with Verna Allee is the co-author of the Quality Tools Matrix™.
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Member
Cyrus Mbugua
Nairobi, Kenya
Am passionate about Sustainability and the Circular Economy.
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Member
Grant Gibson
Portland, Oregon, United States of America
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Member
Erinch Sahan
Oxford, England, United Kingdom
Erinch is the business and enterprise lead at Doughnut Economics Action Lab. His work focuses on transforming the deep design of businesses to enable them to pursue regenerative and distributive strategies. Working with 22 partner organisations and over 300 businesses, he has lead DEAL’s work to create the Doughnut Design for Business tool, which enables businesses to engage with the concepts of Doughnut Economics. Erinch has been in leadership roles across business, NGOs and government. He was the chief executive of the World Fair Trade Organization, the global network and verifier of social enterprises who fully practise Fair Trade. He has also spent 7 years at Oxfam working in campaigns and programmes, including in creating and leading the Behind the Brands scorecard. Erinch has also worked at Procter & Gamble as a market strategy manager, established a furniture business and worked for Australia's aid programme in Indonesia. Erinch is a board member of the Social Enterprise World Forum and the Finance Innovation Lab. He is also a fellow at the Post Growth Institute and a senior associate at Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership where he teaches sustainable value chains to post-graduate students. He holds degrees in finance and law, a masters in international law and an honorary doctorate from Oxford Brookes University.
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