Thread by @bbaue

"If one were to start with a blank slate to design an economic system that provides for comprehensive social and ecological sustainability and regeneration, would our current system be the outcome?

The answer is an unequivocal NO!"

r3dot0.medium.com/funding-govern…

"Our current economic system, whose design requires extraction, exploitation, and colonisation, has long been generating:

--Ecological devastation — evidenced by climate chaos, biodiversity loss through the 6th mass extinction, and the breaching of Planetary Boundaries, and..."

"--Social destruction — centuries of entrenched racial and gender inequality, obscene wealth and power concentration, systemic human rights deprivations — including more enslavement now than when slavery was a legal institution, and genocide."

"The ecological and the social are interconnected: especially in the western and technologically-focused cultures, people have been separated from their own sense of agency, isolated from each other and encultured into a largely extractive relationship with the natural world."

"How did this come about? Perhaps the most concise diagnosis of the problem is that our current provisioning system focuses on surplus, instead of sufficiency. Its orientation: the allocation of scarce resources rather than stewarding for the (re)generation of natural abundance."

This is a key section at the beginning of the Critique Chapter of the r3.0 "Funding Governance for Systemic Transformation" Blueprint that was published at our Conference in September. We're now posted chapters serially on our Medium channel.

r3dot0.medium.com

"This chapter lays out our critique of the current funding governance system. The critique shows how many existing funding systems, despite their ostensible positive intent, are so bounded by the current extractive capitalist economic system..."

"...that they operate as an inadequate corrective to the dysfunctional system, in essence simply reinforcing a highly problematic status quo, and creating more illusion than practice of positive impact."

"The job of this chapter is to analyse this dysfunction, in order to set foundations for the rest of this Blueprint to explore what a more functional funding governance system, what we call a 'regenerative funding governance' system, would look like."

"If we want to govern funding flows regeneratively, the mechanisms must exist that ensure resources (including, but not exclusively, financial resources) flow to regenerative work (regenerative funding) and be supported by governance mechanisms to ensure this happens."

"The work involved must not solely be the domain of those privileged with wealth and time, as is the current case with existing philanthropic and socioeconomic systems."

The full critique chapter: r3dot0.medium.com/funding-govern…

The full Blueprint: r3-0.org/wp-content/upl…