Ariane König: Regenerating Society

In this episode of SystemShift, Ariane König shares her work on studying complex systems, as well as practical advice for creating a regenerative society. She dives deep into defining what a system is in complex social-ecological-technological systems and stresses the significance of collective intelligence and transdisciplinary approaches in her research. Ariane discusses the work of political economist Elinor Ostrom on social coordination and the mechanisms that govern it, with examples of how market competition and government regulation fail, particularly in the case of common goods that are limited in their supplies. The conversation then looks at how to create a regenerative society, which involves both top-down and bottom-up approaches. Ariane highlights the need for local action and engaging in activities that can help regenerate the ecosystem, be it in an urban or rural setting. 

Carl Schlyter: 
Welcome to this episode of Greenpeace podcast SystemShift. In this episode, we welcome Ariane König who will help us explore what a system is. Complex, social, ecological, technological systems and we will look at the importance of studying interactions across different systems, scales and timescales.

Ariane is an assistant professor at the University of Luxembourg, where she leads a team focused on social ecological system research. Her work stresses the significance of collective intelligence and transdisciplinary approaches, which are essential for tackling complex problems. Her latest project is all about developing a regenerative culture in society.

We’ll also discuss the work of political economist Elinor Ostrom, who was the first woman to win the prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, for her analysis of economic governance, especially for the Commons. Ostrom’s research on collective action and the mechanisms behind it is particularly relevant for the challenges we face today, especially when it comes to limited common goods such as declining fish stocks and carbon markets.

We’ll be exploring solutions, including regenerative agriculture and how to create regenerative society through both top down and bottom up approaches. Ariane will share examples of empowering local people to take action and implement regenerative practices such as Luxembourg’s Forest and Climate Change Fund, with its vision of providing the financial and technological conditions to restore forests through partnerships with local people who share that vision.

We will also be discussing the idea of payment scheme for those who engage in regenerative activities, which could sustain livelihoods and be a new type of welfare system in a regenerative society. We’ll provide tips on how to get started on regenerative projects, including finding the free spaces and utilizing citizen science tools.

Join us as we explore the fascinating world of social ecological systems research with Ariane König. Without further ado, a warm welcome to you Ariane.

Ariane Konig:
Thank you. I’m really glad to be here and I look forward to contributing to thinking about system shift.

What is a system?

Carl Schlyter: 
Yeah, and actually, when I read up on you, you did something that I haven’t seen before actually defining what is a system.

Ariane König:
My research group and I, we look at complex social, ecological, technological systems and we consider that a system is a conceptual construct. The system has elements and a purpose and a boundary. This construct is usually designed to address specific questions. The questions we ask is how do patterns of behavior emerge and get stabilized? What can be disrupted in such complex systems? Where we actually look at the interaction of elements in the social sphere, the technological sphere, and the ecological sphere. That is interesting because we actually believe that is somewhat of a blind spot in at least the scientific knowledge system that well has evolved into disciplines and knowledge fields that are usually focused on a particular subsystem like the economy, or the society, or a particular tribe or cultural group or an ecosystem or a cell, molecular biology. The disciplines look at particular systems, at particular scales and time scales, whereas our approach to knowledge tries to complement that, in looking at interactions across well-studied systems and across scales and time-scales. We develop methods and processes for that as well as concepts. We believe that this is better done collectively. Tapping into collective intelligence of people with very diverse worldviews rather than done by just one person sitting in a tower. So all our research is embedded in practice and transdisciplinary. It draws on very diverse fields of expertise as well as local knowledge and different forms of knowledge, including that of practitioners and place based perspectives.

Carl Schlyter: 
Then the lack of this being done more generally, could that maybe explain why the economic system is not respecting biological borders or why economics systems can have a negative impact on human rights. Is this lack of a full system view, in your opinion?

Ariane König:
Exactly. In our knowledge production, there is a lack of considering feedbacks. In the system’s view of life, we believe that when there are feedbacks across these systems, that actually tends to stabilize patterns of behavior. If the economists, especially before the advent of ecological economics, disregarded impacts on the environment, of the way they inform what actions individual people or organizations should take. Yes, that is definitely problematic. It’s a blind spot. Our entire society and governments to some extent mirror the fragmentation of knowledge that is produced from the discipline; scientific research.

Human impact on systems

Carl Schlyter: 
When you have a system, you mentioned that people can be affected by the system, but people also create systems. So how are the different feedback loops here? I mean, what changes what, so to speak?

Ariane König:
Great. I will try to give an example. Well, I’m not an economist, I’m actually a biochemist. So here’s a quick disclaimer, but there was a good paper by a systems thinker on what should be changed in the way our financial system works or in the way we make activities to be more sensitive to environmental impacts. He basically said that the way we make investments usually follows a particular pattern of an archetype in systems that’s called success to the successful. So, investors are risk averse. They want an investment that promises fairly safe returns over a long period. In the way, we have seen that after the 2008 financial crisis, even if there was investment into renewable energies, photovoltaic and wind and solar energies, after that financial crisis, it plummeted again and more investments were pumped into safe bets, such as well-established nuclear or coal fired power stations. 

Carl Schlyter: 
So the only reason why they are safe bets is for example, nuclear powers are only constructed when they have a very long-term guarantee on the price or other construction that makes it safe.

Ariane König:
Exactly. So all that I think is now in our turbulent times put to question. But in his paper, he basically says, well, it’s actually also about liabilities and who’s liable for what. He recommended to introduce shareholder liabilities for environmental impacts of whatever they invest in. That was interesting, I thought, because that’s then a feedback loop. Because then the shareholders individually will actively look at avoiding damage to their own portfolio and maybe that’s at least as good as the trend that’s happening now that pension funds and other long term thinking organizations really redirect their financial streams. 

Societal systems

Carl Schlyter: 
But you can also see then maybe that we have this directive on risk communication for companies that there are new demands to explain also other than financial risks. So the first step here, the information bases for such a step is partially there. So we have taken a small little step in that direction. What more steps would we need to have a working control system for shareholders to check that their investment is not going to destroy nature? What could be more done there?

Ariane König:
I would like to take three steps back if you allow.

Carl Schlyter: 
Perfect.

Ariane König:
I think if we step back from just looking at the financial system and the actors and the interests there, I would like to start by looking at our societal system. How should we reorganize ourselves in our society to foster the emergence of regenerative culture?

I think just reducing harm to start with is not good enough. The transparency issue you mentioned, yes, there are increasingly regulations demanding transparency on environmental impacts and environmental, social and governance type indicators that firms have to report on. Triple bottom line reporting is standard now and legally mandated. However, I still think just investing so that we reduce damage is not enough.

In our research, we have come to the conclusion that everyone, whether it’s individuals, groups, enterprises or organizations at higher levels of social organizations, so municipalities, nations, everyone should think about how can we regenerate our ecosystems, because that is a very, very concrete question and just reducing harm is no longer good enough. I think the first thing we need to change is the overarching goal if we want to survive as a civilization.

Then we ask regenerative initiatives in a rapidly changing world where we have accelerating ecological degradation and mass extinction of species, with over 25% of all plant and animal species endangered from extinction, as was estimated by the International Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. We need to regenerate, we need to change the goal and we need to therefore organize individual initiatives, but also our accounting regimes around place based regenerative initiatives first and foremost. Our research looks at how can we achieve that.

There has been decades of research of the tragedy of the commons. Why our current approach to social coordination is problematic and actually tends to exhaust natural resources beyond the degree that they can replenish themselves. That’s called the tragedy of the commons. Our research is more about Elinor Ostrom’s approach. She won a prize on economics in memory of Nobel, and she was the first woman to do so. Her research focused on the question of social coordination. She distinguished different prevailing mechanisms of social coordination. First of course, we have market competition that very much shapes how we interact and what goals we pursue and how we organize ourselves and coordinate. The second approach, as she distinguished, is government regulation that is more a top-down mechanism of social coordination that relies on laws and carrots and constraints in a way, in the form of subsidies and prohibitions or rules that need to be followed. She also highlighted how systematically these mechanisms of social organization fail. If we look at the commons, looking at common goods, which we all should have access to, no one can be excluded, but that are also limited in their supply, such as fish stocks or forests or groundwater basins. She highlighted giving the example of fisheries and the well-known problem of declining fish stocks and the Canadian approach to say, okay, we need to limit the catch that big trawlers bring into harbors.

Carl Schlyter: 
It wasn’t too successful though, since they killed off the cod stocks.

Ariane König:
Exactly, it was not successful at all. Because the practices that emerged from that, in our competitively organized economy, was that trawlers went out, caught many fish on the boat, and sorted out the high quality fish. They threw the low quality fish back into the sea and got back to the harbor with the catch that fit the bill that corresponded to the limit. Of course, the fish half-dead in the sea did not help the fish stocks to recover. Another example is carbon markets and carbon trading schemes that at least initially had severe problems, a leading to slash and burn practices in the Amazonas just to plant large eucalyptus tree plantations in what was formerly a healthy and extremely biodiverse ecosystem. Because, of course, eucalyptus trees grow so nice and quick and sequester much more carbon and therefore are much more valuable to a carbon capture and trading scheme than diverse age old rainforest with very slow and many aged, old, slow growing species.

Carl Schlyter: 
Yeah, we see that for the boreal forest, which actually contains more stocked carbon than all the tropical forests in the world. There you see you have an annual increase naturally in an old boreal forest. But the industry always says that let’s plant and cut and plant again and then you have an annual higher increase, but you never calculate really the huge loss to biodiversity, climate, soil, carbon losses calculated in correct ways. So there is an example of you are not setting the correct system limits or time space to actually show the real impacts on economy and ecology.

Ariane König:
Absolutely. Ecosystems around trees, especially around old trees, are much richer than around young trees. If we look at a 300-year-old oak and the soil biodiversity in terms of soil, microbes and insects and the entire food web that has established around that tree, it’s entirely different from a young sapling growing where maybe an old tree died but was uprooted or harvested in its entirety.

Carl Schlyter: 
Nothing has more life than the dying tree. It’s full of life.

Ariane König:
Yes.

Regenerative systems

Carl Schlyter: 
I was thinking about another term you used earlier was regenerative. I mean, it’s more and more popular to talk about regenerative agriculture and people might start to understand what that is. But what signifies a regenerative system?

Ariane König:
A regenerative system has the capacity to renew itself, even in the face of adversity. It’s similar to a resilient system, if you so wish. As that term is more used in climate change. The emphasis is on the self-renewal capacity. We in our research actually look at social coordination in complex social, ecological, technological systems. We ask how can we better organize the interplay and redesign social structures and practices, as well as the material environment that includes infrastructures as well as our ecosystems that will likely need our help to cope with accelerating climate change. So how can we, by design, enhance the self-regenerative, self-renewable capacity of that system?

We all know that ecosystems, especially very diverse soil microbial communities or aquatic ecosystems can actually help us to degrade pollutants and they can help us to clean water and clean the air. Trees filter out particulate matter of different sizes and other particles that pollute the air from our pollutant emissions. So what can we do to secure that self-regenerative capacity that we rely on when we have our socio-industrial metabolism with its emissions and the way it draws on natural resources, through interplay with nature based solutions, and how can we learn what works in the rapidly changing world. That is in a way our focus. We have come to the conclusion that Elinor Ostrom’s theory of social learning as a mechanism of social coordination is much more promising than if we just rely on government regulation and the markets as the two prevailing forms of organization in our society.

Carl Schlyter: 
So if you want the social system to have the characteristics of a regenerative system, how would that look like and work?

Ariane König:
The first thing we need to think about, as we stated before, is the overarching goal. I think a goal of economic growth on a finite planet is problematic, especially given many, many, many studies that show the problem of decoupling economic growth from environmental impacts is a huge challenge, and there is doubt cast upon the belief that that is possible. There we come into a feedback loops, so a classic feedback loop within our socio-industrial system is that the mantra goes, okay, we need to invest into becoming more efficient, the way we use energy in the way we draw on natural resources, and we need to invest more in renewables. But efficiency, just investing in efficiency is problematic because in a market setting, a lot of the time, if a firm then gains savings from increased energy efficiency in production processes, for example, these savings are often plowed back into growth, into growing sales, and that’s the so-called rebound effect. It’s a feedback loop that actually highlights one reason why decoupling with wrong system goals is problematic. That’s one aspect. The goal of our system that needs to change.

The other aspects of our systems that need to change is that if we want a system shift to a regenerative system first, looking at society is that we need to embrace the wisdom that ecological health and human health are inseparable. The best investment we can make for human well-being and flourishing again, is in both the health of ecosystems where we stand at any scale. At the same time, we also need to invest and change that our connection to nature and how we think of ourselves as embedded, interacting with nature.  We really need to start afresh thinking who we are and what our place on earth is. That’s a very, very fundamental first step in the system shift to a regenerative system that we actually regenerate ourselves if we spend that time in nature and time looking and understanding ecosystems. We need different ways of measuring and accounting for that. I think if each of us sets our own goals of looking where we live at home and where we work. Where we spend a lot of our time and think what simple things can we do to regenerate the ecosystem. Be it and the urban setting, be it and a rural setting on a farm or anywhere really, and be it on a building. What can we do to make this place attractive to more and more species? I think those are goals for a regenerative society, and there should be the possibility to spend time on that and to spend resources on that and that’s actually the question that we pursue. So starting from an ideal type society may be all starting from an understanding that the future is actually open and unpredictable. How can we just start experimentation on the spot and learn over time what serves as best in a regenerative system?

Top-down changes and bottom-up action

Carl Schlyter: 
Many of our guests we have been talking about, and what you could easily say is the top-down approach. What needs to be change in the central parts of the system, have this great social engagement and feel the meaning of purpose and community and doing this in the laboratory? Can you talk a little bit about that please?

Ariane König:
We need both top-down changes and bottom-up action and ideally top-down government regulation. Markets and financial systems would really focus on how they can empower local actors to actually take actors and implement something. Turning our perspective around from our usual understanding of human agency as citizens, we don’t only vote, of course we can vote and we can found NGOs to have impacts on political processes, but we should really engage in local action. How do we empower and what do we need to do? First, looking at markets and financial systems, there’s actually one example that is very notable in Luxembourg. It’s the Forestry and Climate Change Fund, which actually invests in local communities, mainly in Latin America, to regenerate complex forests that are age-old. At the same time, this fund doesn’t only look at ecological outcomes, but one main point of focus is what does the community who lives with and in the forest need to both regenerate the forest and take a stewardship role, or even beyond a stewardship role? At the same time, how can the community sustain itself while it’s doing that? The problem is that such projects are very, very difficult to scale. I think there are several insights gained from research on such regenerative projects that need to be taken note of when we organize ourselves. There are no silver bullet solutions. Place based knowledge of local actors should weight more than experts. Of course, expert knowledge, let’s say biologists developing complex population models of endangered species. Of course all that is helpful, but in the end what counts is the complex, sort of interaction of local interests, local expertise, the local ecosystem, local technologies. If then the conclusion is we need to help the community to harvest little amounts of diverse wood types and to engage in labor intensive practices of making designer furniture and unique pieces that may not correspond to a global competitive market logic. But, that is certainly a way that a regenerative culture can both respect local social needs as well as local ecological needs and adapt the choices of technologies and economic activities to that and operate within that frame. 

Social components of regenerative initiatives

Carl Schlyter: 
And also then considering the impact on Indigenous cultures and their rights to the area and space and culture and livelihood, they would have, would that be possible to combine with other local people. 

Ariane König:
That brings us back to the question of how can we bring about a system shift that we engage in such regenerative practices so not only in local pockets, but how can we learn from each other, both regionally as well as globally? I think the concept that serves us well again, is Ellinor Ostrom’s concept of we need to develop social structures and practices for social learning, that we create networks of local communities. Never have we been better equipped technologically in our network knowledge society with our mobile phones where you can at any point in time enter geolocation and time tagged information on particular circumstances. So never have we been better equipped to collectively develop actually databases on the interaction of human regenerative initiatives and how they play out in the real world and in real ecological systems, ecosystems. We are very much interested in developing in my research team concepts, methods and tools, as well as social processes where we experiment for regenerative initiatives that have social components, for instance, agroforestry. So where we are at the moment very interested in what we need to do to scale up agro-ecological in agroforestry practices in farming in Luxembourg and beyond. It’s really interesting that the EU, in their revised Common Agricultural Policy, has actually promoted such practices and set aside funds for the adoption of such practices. Member States need to develop national Common Agricultural Policy strategies on how they want to draw on these EU agricultural funds. It’s interesting that some countries have actually now developed instruments, for example, agroforestry practices can be implemented by farmers. But interestingly, these have not been developed in a way that they are being taken advantage of both in Germany and in France. So defining agroforestry, it’s problematic because of course it’s a bit more complex to manage. But if you plant tree strips in agricultural fields in distance of 30 or 40 meters, you still can use large combine harvesters, for example. But the problem is another one. It’s so the fact that so many strings have attached to these particular financial instruments and the regulations to take advantage of them, in terms of conditions you need to follow that hardly any farm enterprise feels given the other subsidy spots, that they are dependent upon and that business model and global commodity prices that they can actually engage in these practices because the system won’t allow it on the one hand, and because there are too many constraints and they don’t leave enough room for experimentation. 

Characteristics of good social organization

Carl Schlyter: 
For those solutions, then of course, you also need some top-down new laws and regulations on the European level or national level. If I’m now a part of a rural neighborhood where my forests are destroyed with the agricultural land is not specious rich and the local services are disappearing to the cities. If I want to like organize a counter assistance, if I want to build a better future for my local neighborhood, what characterizes a successful social change? And is it the difference in how this is built up and working if I am in a minority group in a rural setting that is disadvantaged, also losing services and access to good nature, what are the similarities and what are the differences and what characterizes a successful social organization under those conditions?

Ariane König:
I would like to say still, you said, well, in this case we need more regulation. I think the goal of the regulation should not be to control individual actions on the assumption that expert based laws and measures constrain the individual freedom to develop the initiatives on their own land. I think it should be about empowerment and opening up rooms for experimentation and trusting local actors that are engaged in actually a learning system that they may have other relevant knowledge to shape their initiatives. It shouldn’t be about control with carrots in terms of subsidies and constraint. However, we need regulatory approaches that empower local actors to experiment and learn. I think actually, if governments and policy makers were looking more to foster transformation laboratories or living laboratories, and here we come to answer your question. So how can we organize local initiatives that promise success over time in a turbulent world to reconcile human needs and ecological regeneration? So what do we need to do? 

I think the first focus would be to establish something that is a place based initiative. So we need a group of people, engaged people, but that is at the same time a very well connected and networked to other similar initiatives with overlapping goals so that we can learn more efficiently and quicker from each other. Both about what is specific to that place and time. But that is also perhaps more generally valid in terms of how we organize a social process. That’s why we actually look at tools like citizen science tools where local groups negotiate how they want to, for instance, establish a nature based solution, be it a river regeneration or be it a nature restoration project in a forest or on farmland. What they want to do, but at the same time, how they can still sustain their livelihoods whilst doing that. They set themselves goals and then they decide what do we want to measure and what are our criteria for success in our setting with our interests and capacities. Then we engage in a long-term learning process because the future is open and unpredictable. Any knowledge is uncertain. Models may have limitations that make them less applicable to specific places. We need social learning processes and we need to design initiatives both from the ecology of the place, the social elements in terms of existing social structures and expertise and capacities and firms, but also new dimensions and aspects that shall be developed in that place in a place based manner. We also need to design the technology to go with it  so that we can actually capture changes.  In terms of human influence on different species and the ecosystem – state of the ecosystem at large. We really need to design a system shift locally and learn from each other. But thinking across the interplay of these three dimensions, not only one of them, not only society.  

Balancing regulation and society engagement

Carl Schlyter: 
So if we have in today’s system subsidies and so on, that does not really permit people to experiment, for example, with forest grazing or whatever that used to be a tradition in many countries.

Ariane König:
Yes.

Carl Schlyter: 
At the same time you answered to my question, no I don’t want to regulate more. So my question then is how do you open up for this freedom of local adaptation without using traditional greedy businesses, using loopholes that they would create to do evil? Is it possible to do these openings in today’s system, or do we need some kind of value shifts in order to have this released freedom? What are the conditions that we can do that without this being exploited by people with old fashioned mindsets about planet and profit?

Ariane König:
It’s a key question. I think our regulatory culture, of course, in our democracies is organized around accountability for public spending. That goes hand in hand with controllability. Therefore, policymakers define specific measures for implementation usually, and then there is control, whether they are implemented in the way these were intended. There are monitoring schemes attached to it. Everything is organized in a top-down manner and of course in an understandable way. That very much is the essence of our regulatory culture. Now, I think we would need to think of really a fundamental change in what does it take to have a regulatory culture that seeks empowerment. I think this investment in transformation laboratories and in networks of transformation, laboratories where a network is different place, based entities that have an overarching shared goal would be the most promising approach. At the moment, I think we just need to fight that there are pockets for open experimentation where we may be allowed to have a carte blanche and disregard existing rules. I think my research in Luxembourg has pointed to contradictions between policy, laws, and measures promoting water protection, promoting nature protection and in the agricultural set of policies. I think the challenge of the system shift we’re talking about is that our system has rigid, defied over time and become more detailed and more fragmented. We somehow need pockets for experimentation where we say, okay, let’s just pause and empower actors to act in the way that they are not bound by this core set, by this rigid system. At the same time, they commit to being accountable for the goals they set themselves and documenting their initiatives in a way that is perennialized so it’s place based and networked. 

Universal basic income

Carl Schlyter: 
You also wrote a little bit about basic income, because if people want to be more engaged in society, everybody says, I have no time today. That is another constraint in developing this trust base and community based structures, isn’t it?

Ariane König:
Absolutely, at the moment, we are so much trapped in our hamster wheels to earn our salaries, and one of our projects involved a developing national scenarios in the participatory process over four years on how we might engage with water and land in 2045 in Luxembourg. We were also interested in the EU in global contexts, and the three very different worlds emerged. Just to highlight that the future is unpredictable. There may be disruptive events and three future worlds that were co-created with over 100 different actors, some of whom may be 30, engaged in a more intensive manner to really develop one of the scenario worlds. So one of the world was called the web of Life, and each of the three worlds had a different prevailing form of social coordination. The smart world scenario has, for instance, still market competition and government regulation as prevailing mechanisms. That was a more a techno centric scenario, where they still thought that technology would sustain ourselves given limited resources. A second scenario was anthropocentric. So really looked at well-being, sort of maximizing, giving primacy to human well-being and the third scenario was egocentric. So play and social coordination in the third scenario was very much organized according to the Elinor Ostrom Social learning paradigm, but still with a fairly present nation state. But aiming to have governance decentralized around more ecological bounded regions, looking for example, at water catchments and the first prime concern that anyone who contributed to the scenario was saying is what needs to happen, that people have time to engage in developing nature based solutions, in regenerating soil with composting and building permaculture gardens. All of that takes a high quality of attention and lots and lots of time and different ways of organizing ourselves for composting and compost delivery and working the soil and planting and watering the plants in drought, summers and things. It needs an entire reorganization. So it’s not only resources but time. The conclusion was we do need a universal basic income with strings attached, was the suggestion that it would be that people can apply to engage in regenerative initiatives that they document on perhaps an Internet platform where they also document failures and lessons learned from their regenerative projects. If they engage ten or 20 or 30 hours a week, they receive a basic salary for those hours spent in regenerative activities. They could also be activities related to making these regenerative projects a sustained livelihood. So there could be a catalog of different regenerative activities ranging from planting but also keeping sheep to offer grazing and soil fertilization as a service to cooking jams and harvesting fruit. All of these are labor intensive, and so, again, we need to think through the entire system of regenerative activities in how technology, and the social dimension and the ecological dimension of how they can be connected through circularly organized activities to regenerate both human health and ecological health. So we need income, we need a payment scheme for this. This could be a new type of welfare system in a regenerative society. 

Carl Schlyter: 
So it’s not really the traditional, unconditional basic income, but more like a working time reduction where some of that would be replaced by community paid work. So to say. 

Ariane König:
Exactly. 

How to engage in regenerative projects

Carl Schlyter: 
If somebody now feels inspired by this and wants to start something up, what is your last Pro tips to start getting engage with other people? What do you recommend?

Ariane König:
Definitely, start where you stand and get together a good group of neighbors and contact your municipality. Find out where there are free spaces for regenerative projects and then write a project proposal. In Luxembourg we have very interesting measures in terms of we have a climate pact and a nature pact in which the national government and municipalities can collaborate and put together public funds to sponsor local projects led by local actors. I think there will be more and more opportunities to develop projects and to get funding for them. Then scout around. There is an increasing number of citizen science tools that may serve your purpose in terms of what impacts you want to measure, in terms of human influence on the environment and vice versa. Environmental influence on human well-being. My group develops such tools. We are launching our first tool called the Water Links, actually in the end of May.  It’s exciting times. You can look at that tool on the website www.citizenscience.lu, and you will find a first citizen science tool that could help you to start at least gathering data about the initiatives that you develop and then keep at it. Think about how you can increase your sphere of influence. Think about how you can maybe develop a regional from it or an EU level project. I think the number of instruments promoting such regenerative initiatives and local experimentation is growing.

Carl Schlyter: 
Yeah, and if your self-identification is that you’re a businessman, you still have community interest companies and local benefit corporation. So even with that mindset. 

Ariane König:
Any transformation lab should be linked to a crowdfunding platform. I think there’s an increasing number of corporations interested in sponsoring regenerative initiatives, and the corporate sponsors could engage their staff and invite them to go out in the field and engage in sort of looking for indicator species on the spots where they may have funded the tree planting of 500 trees for their corporate reports. I think there are many more things we can do that any one brain imagines at any point in time. We just need to get together groups and start these regenerative initiatives right now because time is running out and learn as you go.

Carl Schlyter: 
It was really nice having you here today. Thank you so much, Ariane.

Ariane König:
My pleasure.

Ariane König is an assistant professor at the University of Luxembourg leading a team on social ecological systems research. https://www.citizenscience.lu/ | https://transformation-lab.lu/