Good growth is the movement from extractive relationships to regenerative relationships, considering 3 ‘capitals’: Social, natural & financial.

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The Three Capitals

  1. Natural capital — This refers to anything from the invisible microorganisms in the soil to the largest plant (a self-cloning seaweed the size of Cincinnati!!). All deserving respect, love in their own right, but are also the building blocks of an environment that supports among many other wonders, humans. Yaay.
  2. Social capital —This refers to the networks, relationships, culture and understandings that allow people to cooperate. It also includes the ways of relating between people that allow us to coordinate to fulfil our material, spiritual, emotional and health needs.
  3. Financial capital — This refers to money or other human-created instruments that allow us to facilitate and coordinate activities at physical, geographical and temporal scales beyond the immediate by creating the capacity to accumulate, store, transfer and exchange value.

Relationships

Good growth requires us to be in a regenerative relationship with the world (or to be trying our best to get there). The regenerative relationship is one that we are largely unfamiliar with (there are communities that have retained the knowledge of this relationship — but they have been sidelined, denied, oppressed). The regenerative relationship is one that seeks to improve the world around us, to play our part in it, rather than contain it to play a part in our endeavours.

We should aim to progress our relationship from extractive to regenerative:

  1. Extractive and harmful
  2. Minimising Harm
  3. Zero Harm
  4. Positive
  5. Regenerative

The examples below do not necessarily mean that the organisation or approach reflects all of its interactions, but give an idea of what that type of relationship looks like. (click arrows to expand)

  1. Extractive and harmful: only see the elements of the capital that serve our purposes and create harms within that capital and others. We reduce the richness of the world to the one single dimension in which we can extract value — usually reducing to the financial dimension.
  2. Minimising harm: Requires an acknowledgement of the harms caused. The best version of this is design of business models to minimise impacts in the first place. There is some debate about whether “net” minimisation - where the reduction of harm happens indirectly through some kind of an offset - is a useful way to minimise or might excuse failures to design for minimisation.
  3. Zero harm: Business models that design out all negative impacts. There is some debate about whether “net” minimisation - where the reduction of harm happens indirectly through some kind of an offset - is a useful way to minimise or might excuse failures to design for zero harm.
  4. Positive: Designing business models that have no harm and in addition have positive impacts.
  5. Regenerative: Designing business models that strengthen the systems it interacts with to develop their capacity to generate ever greater benefits to life across all capitals.