“Bioregional democracy (or the Bioregional State) is a set of electoral reforms and commodity reforms designed to force the political process in a democracy to better represent concerns about the economy, the body, and environmental concerns (e.g. water quality), toward developmental paths that are locally prioritized and tailored to different areas for their own specific interests of sustainability and durability. This movement is variously called bioregional democracy, watershed cooperation, or bioregional representation, or one of various other similar names—all of which denote democratic control of a natural commons and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path decisions.” *
Excerpted from James Quilligan:
“In coming years, the resources that we now waste, especially water and food, will become much less available. Without new economic thinking on wealth creation and sustainable development, free trade will continue to expand mass consumption and swallow the world’s natural resources. More fundamentally, society will be prevented from adjusting its economy to the world’s natural processes and designs, especially Earth’s hydrological and agricultural cycles.
It’s time to consider that bioregional self-sufficiency—the principle of meeting human needs within the constraints of resource areas—is really what leads to democracy and prosperity. Instead of seeking a Ricardian comparative advantage through global trade integration and rentier economies, the new social imperative will be for regions to become as self-sufficient as possible in the production and distribution of resources within their own eco-regions. Rather than maximizing total assets through a macroeconomic calculus, communities will focus on maximizing supply for the common good, producing and distributing resources according to the natural functions and rhythms of their environment.
Self-sufficiency means staying within the local or regional carrying capacity and taxing, not the value that people add to the commons, but the value they take from the commons. This creates dividends for citizens and the means of regenerating their resources. When people recover the capacity to sustain their population directly through the region where they live, there is no need to seek comparative advantage over the resources of others. Only when this is not possible would they look outside of their bioregion for trade.
The management of commons on a small scale has been successful throughout history because of interpersonal engagement. It’s easier for people to share resources when they know and trust one another. But technology-driven networks now enable the qualities of small-group dynamics to be applied in the collaborative management of much larger resource areas. This can be done without sacrificing personal trust, transparency or self-organized cooperation.
Just as the interests of corporations are not limited to a single nation, the social interest in an ecosystem is not confined to sovereign borders. Collective management systems may be created through communities of resource users, whether their ecosystems are within a single nation or spread across sovereign lines.
It’s important to remember that the members of local and regional communities are much closer to resource distribution problems than national governments, and a far richer source of local knowledge, innovation and ways of meeting human needs equitably and ecologically. For example, local communities have pioneered water management techniques like rainwater catches and drip irrigation which reduce water evaporation, and the recycling of household sewage for agriculture rather than publicly dumping the waste and polluting aquifers and wells.
What bioregional democracy requires is collaborative decision-making within a resource area. This is not such a novel idea. Identifying and building bioregional coalitions is a phenomenon that predates private property and sovereign boundaries. In fact, communities for resource management have historical roots all over the world, ranging from the Arab waqf, the Jewish kibutz and the Brazilian cooperative to the European guild, the English commons and the communitarian practices in hundreds of indigenous cultures.
While often unrecognized, transborder resource communities are rapidly growing. These include subsistence commons based on forests, fisheries, arable land and wild game; regional associations for the re-localization of food production, community-supported agriculture and permaculture; subsistence agriculture; seed-sharing cooperatives; and coalitions for irrigation and regional water access. There are also attempts to create collaborative resource management zones for the Arctic, the Amazon Basin, the Great Lakes of North America, the Jordan Rift Valley and the world’s wilderness areas, rivers, oceans and atmosphere.
In most cases, large-scale resource communities need the approval of their governments to work effectively. Through multilateral treaties and charters for the public benefit, the State may partner with these coalitions. This will allow transborder communities—comprised of civil society organizations, community associations, merchants, farmers, engineers, producers, professionals, educators and many other groups—to cultivate cooperative relationships and develop the legitimacy and mandate to leverage governmental policy. By organizing, they can begin to share power through stakeholder trusts and State trusteeships for collective resource management.
Here’s how this might work. The trust determines a specific, measurable cap to protect a resource for the future based on the preservation, consumption and regeneration of the common resource. The trust then leases an agreed portion of this resource to the private sector. Businesses extract and process the resources available outside of the cap, allocate and sell them as products, make profits and pay taxes to the governments of the region. The governments recirculate these funds to their citizens as dividends or subsistence income. And the trust spends its leasing income on the maintenance of protected commons and the replenishment of those resources that are depleted.
The capping of resources for future generations can also create a new source of monetary equity and credit. Regionally protected commons such as water, soil, forests, wildlife, seabed minerals, energy and indigenous patents may be used as reserves for a regional bank. This would generate a broad measure of sustainability that is not based on productivity, pro?t or interest, but on the resilience of natural assets in supporting a good quality of life and well-being for all citizens of a region.”