With permission from r3.0 (Redesign for Resilience & Regeneration), a nonprofit that reimagines how the global economy can truly support people and the planet, we’re publishing selected chapters from its Seeds Series Volume 2 as part of an ongoing series. This new volume explores a vital question: how can societies intentionally dismantle collapsing systems and replace them with regenerative ones that can endure and help life flourish?
Read more from the series here: Executive Summary | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
Melanie Goodchild’s concept of relational systems thinking connects two distinct ways of understanding the world: Western systems thinking and Indigenous systems thinking. This idea also helps us move from our previous thematic cluster, Systems, into our current focus on Relationality, reminding us that these themes are themselves related and interconnected, not separate.
“Inside the teaching lodge, we engage in a process I’ve termed relational systems thinking where awareness-based systems change centers mutual benefit, a foundational principle that Uncle Dan [Longboat] shared with me, between all the humans, the non-humans, the unborn generations and our Earth Mother.”
Melanie Goodchild, Relational Systems Thinking, 2021
If a systemic lens aligns with considerations of regenerative economies (and not all of the systems-investing initiatives listed in the introduction to the last section necessarily do so), the relationality lens naturally lends itself to regenerative cultures. We caution, however, against simplistic assumptions, as systems help shape cultures and relationality helps shape economies – as evidenced by David Bollier and Natasha Hulst of the Schumacher Center for New Economics‘ recently published essay, Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions, which further connects relationality and systems.
“Relationalized finance is our generic term for finance that is not meant to generate private financial gains, but rather to support and deepen new relationships – social, economic, and political – in particular bioregions. This non-capitalist finance is non-extractive, peer-governed, place-specific, humane, and designed to support the generativity of living systems. It does not regard ‘nature’ and ‘finance’ as separate and autonomous entities, but as artfully aligned and entwined with each other.”
Relationality brings emotion into view – what Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil, and Kriti Sharma describe as love, grief, and loss in their work on Relationality. Many of our interviewees repeatedly emphasized that, more broadly, relationality is about empathy. Some of them began exploring this theme by looking inward, focusing on internal relationality, or relationality to the self.
Vanessa Andreotti shared an exercise she co-developed with the Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures collective called 7 Steps Back, which invites us to examine our relationships to ourselves. The exercise calls for taking successive steps back from:
- your self-image;
- your generational cohort;
- universalization of your social/cultural/economic parameters of normality;
- your immediate context and time;
- familiar patterns of relationship-building and problem-solving that you have been socialized into;
- normalized pattern of elevating humanity above the rest of nature; and
- the impulse to find quick fixes and expand your capacity not to be immobilized by uncertainty, complicity and complexity.
These are “the kinds of questions we need to be asking,” Vanessa suggests. “But we’re not even beginning to be able to do that collectively,” opening from self-relationality to broader relationality.
Carol Sanford called for a shift “from institutionalizing fundamentalism that says, you can’t question anything, to a move back toward an Indigenous theocracy designed to help people think for themselves as an everyday practice.” She essentially advocates for a shift from universality (“unquestionably unmovable” fundamentalist “theocracy”) that ultimately isolates individuals from themselves (and thereby others) to pluriversality (“people were allowed to own their own theocracy”), energized by the personal agency for critical thinking that enables more authentic relationality with others across difference.
Such self-awareness centers us, enabling expansion into broader relational awareness. Carol advocated for “place-centric work,” appealing to her notion of “lifeshed” that integrates watersheds, airsheds, etc: “It’s imperative for our Mother Earth that we define how we work with economies based on place – lifeshed-by-lifeshed – because they are defined by awareness of natural systems. Go become compost and feed the entire system, including the wetland.”
“Making good relationships with the human and more-than-human world is the primary currency of well-being,” says Robin Wall-Kimmerer, underlining how this “horizontal” relationality (with all life) is foundational to regenerative economies. Sahana Chattopadhyay calls this biocentric relationality:
“Regenerative economy moves from anthropocentrism to life-sustaining biocentrism, embedded in relationality. In a community, in a society, in a civilization or culture that is based on regenerative economies, there is individual agency, sovereignty, and thriving, as well as community and society thriving. It is not the community at the cost of the individual, or the individual at the cost of the community. I’m saying the individual is in an interrelated, entangled society. So you have regenerative economics supporting this entangled, interrelated civilizational evolution.”
In addition to this spatial relationality, interviewees also appealed to temporal relationality. Nwamaka Agbo introduces the notion of intergenerational relationality by speaking of the need to be:
“Thinking about and preparing for intergenerational conversations. We’re starting to be more intentional about how we continue to hold onto the learnings and wisdom of our elders, while also bringing in the excitement and innovation of younger generations – and our ability to reclaim a way of living in relationship where you can have communities across generations be in interdependence with one another. I think this is also part of how we hold onto our traditional ways and wisdoms of stewarding land, of being in relationship with each other.”
Vanessa Andreotti adds another temporal line of retrospective relationality that supports repair through accountability – encompassing what she calls relational maturity.
“No shit, no starter. If we don’t compost what we’ve done and really look closely at how big of assholes we’ve been as human beings to the planet, to other species – if we can’t even sit with that, there’s no way we’re going to weave something different. So if the main problem is fractured relationships, we need to sit with that first and learn to repair it. And repair doesn’t mean we will all agree with each other or validate each other. Repair means something completely different – it means something that is currently unimaginable for us: it’s honoring the tethers we have with each other.”
Nwamaka Agbo extends this retrospective relationality from accountability and repair to transformative healing in collective contexts:
“You don’t heal by ignoring or trying to evade the truth of what happened, right? You actually heal by being able to sit in the unfortunate and deep discomfort and pain of what has happened. Being able to bear witness to that pain, and with that, then, having choice around, how you want to transform that hurt and harm. And to also know that we actually heal in community. A lot of the ways that you’ve been taught that healing happens is, you as an individual. You go into a separate meeting, and you talk just with your therapist, and it’s your own little private secret, and that is it. And what I also know is that if I want to help transform my community, there are times and places where we actually need to heal in community. We need to bear witness together. We need to go through deep accountability and recognition of the hurt and harm that has happened, and take actionable steps for repair together.”
Nwamaka adds geopolitical spatiality to the temporal, seeking to transcend the discursive loops of entrenched relational patterns:
“We just want to ignore what has been done to Indigenous, Black, and Brown communities in the Global South for decades. We just want them to go away so that we can move forward. And that is why we are all stuck, because the inability to actually reckon with the hurt and harm that we could cause and continue to cause even to this day, is what means that we end up replicating the same pattern over and over again. We actually do not learn from our actions – and the steps of reconciliation and repair and restitution are all deeply grounded in ensuring that we learn from previous actions and history, so that we don’t recreate them again in the future. So I think that is where the missed opportunity really really sticks out to me for what healing can look like in community.”
Daniel Christian Wahl anchors spatial/temporal relationality to a specific place, as a means of navigating to healing through a more transformative discursive emotional experience:
“There’s so many opportunities in the bioregional movement – from healing people’s relationship with place and past traumas that happened in that place, to making people fall deeply in love with place again.”
“Every act of caring, sharing, healing, nurturing, protecting, connecting with place, stewarding place: all of that is an expression of life’s regenerative impulse coming through us as human beings, which are part of life. It’s naturally happening everywhere.”
Daniel also points to the risks of what Escobar, Osterweil, and Sharma call “non-relationality” in their 2024 book Relationality:
“In other words, one can describe the dominant story as the making of non-, or anti-, relationality, given that it banishes profoundly relational life-worlds and knowledges to the margins or death, while simultaneously enshrining an ontologically dualist worldview in which either/or, subject/object, good/bad, spirit/matter, body/mind, and so on, not only dominate, but seem natural. It is important to recognize, however, that in those very gestures and stories, there is a kind of relationality. This double maneuver, which involves denying, hiding, and/or annihilating relationality, on the one hand, and making dualism seem natural, inevitable, and universal, on the other, is what we call the active production of nonrelationality.”
Here, Daniel’s reflection echoes non-relationality:
“I think that the biggest danger that we have is that social media and a number of other forces have unleashed the machinery of othering, of separating, of divide and conquer, that is so effective that even in the context of justice – racial justice and decolonialization, economic justice and gender justice – the potential for polarization rather than healing is enormous. So for me, the biggest challenge is to address justice without doing it in such a way that we’re actually just opening up yet again, even in the way we frame it, more dualism that’s framed in a way that doesn’t have a resolution.”
In response to this challenge of polarization, Daniel proposes planetary relationality and ties it into human emotional capacity for empathy.
“We need to build a solid enough higher ground in which we are all one life form on a living planet, and continue to try to do justice in the frameworks of polarization from one nation to another.”
Indy Johar pivots to a counterintuitive interpretation of polarization, casting it in a more positive light through the lens of empathy.
“Societies that are oscillating – i.e., from left to right – actually may even be a good thing. The oscillation function is not polarization. The oscillation function in complexity is a wayfinding mechanism for societies, and actually, they build the intelligence and the capacity to be able to operate in complexity. So it’s a sort of tool – this oscillation that we’re worried about is actually a tool for societies to way-find in complexity. So how do we? What we’ve got to be able to do is hold a decision field, not a decision – and hold the empathy of a decision field as being the real asset, not the decision being the real asset.”
Nate Hagens takes the argument one step further, tying the vitality of our planet to the depth of our empathic care:
“We have to change our value system from a religion of economic growth towards something that puts us as caretakers of the ecosystems and the health of the natural world on our home – the only planet in the known universe to support life, let alone complex life like whales, dolphins, bonobos … and humans.”
This post has been edited for clarity. An earlier version of this piece was published here. The complete Seeds Series, Volume 2, is available here.
