A guest blog by Dr Jan Gerhards

The unfolding sustainability crisis is worse than ever. In his 2020 documentary A Life on Our Planet, David Attenborough looks back at his life, observing how the world has changed. Having charted a dramatic decline, he provides an inspiring vision, calling on us to restore planet Earth. This concept of not merely sustaining, but improving and renewing, is also known as regenerative sustainability. It aims for a positive, thriving relationship between people and planet.

A regenerative philosophy inspired by an ecological worldview reminds us that sustainability is complex, interconnected, changing, driven by human values, and requires us to work together. This approach has been called the "next wave of sustainability thinking" [1]. With that in mind, we can look at the current landscape within the sustainability industry and see how it matches up to this idea.

Sustainability professionals try to scale their vision of a better world by creating what you might call sustainability schemes. These have many names, such as standards, frameworks, certification schemes, rating tools, or reporting tools. For my doctoral research I looked into schemes developed for organisations, communities and cities, and my empirical work examined Bioregional’s One Planet Living framework.

Whilst exploring this field, it struck me that sustainability had become heavily 'standardised'. Schemes are built around criteria that can be easily checked, like verifiable actions, or measurable targets. Such voluntary schemes come with incentives designed to promote their take-up. As a reward, they provide some kind of marketable stamp of approval, some public information like a certification, rating or report, to advertise users’ efforts. Standardisation helps other people trust this information and means criteria can more easily be applied over and over, for example by third-party assessors. But just because it’s taken for granted, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the best way of doing things.

One Planet Living accepts a level of ambiguity and opinion. You may not think this is a big deal, given that a goal-oriented approach is a classic approach to strategy, and that even the UN has its own Sustainable Development Goals. However, One Planet Living is an outlier among sustainability schemes, and, as it happens, Bioregional worked closely with the UN to promote a goal-oriented approach.

What are the strengths and limitations of these different approaches, and how do they compare with regenerative sustainability? Standardised approaches have achieved scale and can provide helpful technical guidance. Yet, in restricting themselves to the unambiguous, concrete and verifiable, something has been lost. Based on the literature I reviewed, none of the schemes I looked at really embodied the "next wave of sustainability thinking". All fell short in terms of promoting a truly ambitious, collaborative, holistic, engaging, dynamic approach. Some were overly prescriptive and found to encourage 'chasing' more easily-obtainable points or credits, others focused mainly on single targets, and others side-stepped the issue of ambitious aims altogether by just focusing on processes or indicators. Somehow, the field of sustainability seems to have been developing ever more creative ways of avoiding simple, aspirational goals.

In contrast, Bioregional has been thinking in regenerative terms for a long time. It promotes a 'hearts and minds' approach that recognises the importance of engaging and inspiring people. One Planet Living’s 10 principles support flexible, ambitious strategies. They form a holistic, interrelated system, and a communicable 'common language' that encourages working together across sectors and scales. The approach is flexible, and plans are created on a more bespoke, case-by-case basis. This isn’t entirely without its challenges. For example, a bespoke approach can lack some of the benefits of more easily replicable approaches; something that is gradually being addressed with measures such as updated guidance.

In being given the time to understand what has been happening beneath the surface of this fascinating organisation and sustainability framework over the years, I believe I uncovered a story worth telling. Regenerative sustainability is needed more than ever. One Planet Living provides a practical example of how such a vision may be realised in practice. It is a recipe for combining great ingredients which need to be present to achieve highly ambitious, regenerative sustainability programmes. It’s an important part of a bigger puzzle in a shift towards systemic regeneration.

Those wishing to learn more can explore the following:

• Ten-minute video presentation for a general audience (embedded below).
• Engaging research report for a general audience.
• Peer-reviewed journal article summarising thesis (manuscript openly available) [2].
• Academic thesis.
• Detailed guidance: indicators and actions for cities and local governments, and indicators and a survey for new communities.

My thanks go to the University of Westminster for funding the research, to Bioregional co-founders, staff, and partners for their collaboration, to my director of studies Dr Dan Greenwood, as well as to others not mentioned in these brief acknowledgements.

^{[1] Gibbons, Leah V. “Regenerative-The New Sustainable?” Sustainability (Switzerland) 12, no. 13 (2020): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12135483.}

^{[2] Gerhards, Jan, and Dan Greenwood. “One Planet Living and the Legitimacy of Sustainability Governance: From Standardised Information to Regenerative Systems.” Journal of Cleaner Production 313, no. May (2021): 127895. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.127895.}