THE ORBITAL Tracking the emergent movement for planetary systems governance

119 actors · 32 projects · 93 events

From the Field

Across Africa, Farmers Are Building Food Sovereignty Through Regenerative Practice

As global food supply chains face mounting pressure from climate disruption and geopolitical instability, farmers across Africa are turning to regenerative practices — green manures, agroforestry, community seed banks — that rebuild local control over food systems.

Across Africa, a quiet shift is underway. As dependency on imported fertilizers and globally traded commodity crops makes food systems increasingly fragile, farmers are rebuilding relationships with their land through agroecological and regenerative practices. These are not new ideas — they draw on indigenous knowledge systems that predate industrial agriculture — but they are spreading through networks, NGOs, and farmer-to-farmer learning in ways that are beginning to reach policy.

The concept of food sovereignty is central here. It goes further than food security, asking not just whether people have enough to eat, but who controls production, how it is organised, and in whose interest. For communities that have seen land grabbed, seeds patented, and markets distorted by subsidised imports, that distinction is not abstract — it is the difference between dependency and autonomy.

Why this matters → The gap that remains is at the policy level. Neither the World Bank's latest Country Climate and Development Reports nor AGRA's recent publications mention agroecology. The practices spreading on the ground have yet to penetrate the institutions with the largest power to scale them.

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agroecologyfood sovereigntyregenerativeafricaland rightsfood systems

Climate Action Is Now a Legal Obligation — and the UN Is About to Say So Formally

The ICJ's landmark July 2025 advisory opinion — confirming that international law requires states to prevent significant harm to the climate — is now moving toward formal UN General Assembly endorsement. Member states are negotiating a draft resolution expected to pass before the end of April 2026.

On July 23, 2025, the International Court of Justice issued its most consequential advisory opinion in decades: states have a legally enforceable duty to protect the climate system, arising not just from the Paris Agreement but from customary international law. The 1.5°C target is legally binding, adaptation is no longer optional, and failure to act can trigger legal liability. The opinion received unanimous support — all 14 judges — and the proceedings had the highest level of participation in the ICJ's history.

Now, in April 2026, UN member states are translating that opinion into formal UN commitment. Vanuatu — a Pacific island nation that has repeatedly warned it may disappear under rising seas — is spearheading a draft resolution that gives the ICJ opinion full General Assembly support. The vote is expected before the end of the month.

Why this matters → For the planetary governance movement, this moment represents something important: the slow shift from voluntary climate commitments to enforceable international obligation. The architecture of planetary governance is being built not just through assemblies and movements, but through international law itself.

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climateinternational lawrightsgovernanceaccountabilityunited nations

Edu-Larp Conference in Gothenburg Tests How Role-Play Builds Democratic Capacity

The Larpocracy project — an EU-funded Horizon research initiative studying how live-action role-play develops deliberative and democratic skills — convened its first Edu-Larp Conference in Gothenburg on April 15, drawing practitioners from across Europe.

At Lindholmen Science Park in Gothenburg on April 15, researchers, educators, and game designers gathered for the first Edu-Larp Conference, organised by the Larpocracy project. The event brought together the consortium — Uppsala University, University of Greenwich, Tampere University, and several European game companies — with broader practitioners to share findings from the project's ongoing research.

Larpocracy (Horizon project 101177307) investigates whether LARP — live-action role-play — can serve as a meaningful space for developing deliberative and democratic skills. The core hypothesis is that embodied experience, where participants make real decisions in consequence-bearing fictional situations, produces a different kind of learning than classroom instruction or online deliberation. The Assembly, one of the project's experimental designs, places participants inside a fictional Swedish community navigating a deliberative democratic event.

Why this matters → For those working on planetary governance, this research matters because democratic skill is a governance resource. A world that needs to make collective decisions at unprecedented scale also needs citizens capable of the kind of slow, effortful deliberation those decisions require. Larpocracy is testing whether play can be part of how that capacity is built.

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educationdemocracydeliberationparticipatorycultureorganizing

New Report: Global Citizens' Assemblies Should Be Embedded in the UN System

A joint report from Democracy International and Democracy Without Borders argues that the UN General Assembly should use Article 22 of the UN Charter to create a permanent framework for Global Citizens' Assemblies — giving randomly selected citizens a formal role in shaping international policy.

The idea of Global Citizens' Assemblies — randomly selected people from around the world deliberating on pressing global challenges — has moved from thought experiment to active institutional proposal. A new joint report from Democracy International and Democracy Without Borders sets out concrete pathways for embedding GCAs in the United Nations system.

The proposal uses Article 22 of the UN Charter, which allows the General Assembly to establish subsidiary bodies. The report recommends a permanent framework coordinated by a common secretariat, allowing any UN body to convene its own ad hoc citizens' assembly as needed — on climate, AI, health crises, or governance reform itself. The model combines a core assembly sitting for extended periods with ongoing community-level assemblies feeding up into it.

Why this matters → The deeper argument is not just institutional but democratic: the decisions being made at the UN level affect everyone on Earth, yet formal participation is restricted to states and the organisations they accredit. GCAs represent one of the most promising structural mechanisms for giving those affected by global decisions a genuine voice in making them.

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Democracy Without Borders
democracycitizens assemblyglobal governancedeliberationparticipatoryunited nations

Malawi's Agroecology Movement Shows What Farmer-First Agriculture Can Look Like

A close-up look at agroecology practice in Malawi reveals how farmer-led, ecologically grounded farming addresses food insecurity and climate vulnerability simultaneously — while raising hard questions about why international development institutions still overlook it.

In Malawi, one of the world's most food-insecure countries and among those most exposed to climate disruption, agroecology is offering something that industrial agriculture has not: a path to food security that works with ecological systems rather than against them. An internship account published by Resilience.org this month offers a rare insider view of what this looks like on the ground — the relationships, the knowledge transfer, the daily practice of farming that builds soil rather than depleting it.

Agroecology, in this context, is not simply a set of techniques. It is a set of values: that farmers should hold knowledge, not just receive it; that food systems should be governed locally; that ecological health and human nutrition are inseparable. In practice, it means intercropping legumes with maize to fix nitrogen, maintaining seed diversity, and building community institutions that give farmers negotiating power with markets.

Why this matters → What makes the Malawi case politically significant is the gap it reveals: despite this evidence, the word agroecology does not appear in the World Bank's Country Climate and Development Report for Malawi. The practices that work remain invisible to the institutions that fund agriculture at scale.

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agroecologyfood sovereigntyfood systemsafricaclimateindigenous knowledge

CIGI Maps the Fault Lines of Digital Governance in 2026

The Centre for International Governance Innovation's annual digital governance outlook identifies a widening gap between the pace of AI and emerging technology and the institutions meant to govern them — while noting that the private sector is filling the vacuum.

The Centre for International Governance Innovation's 2026 digital governance analysis identifies a defining tension for the year ahead: technology is accelerating as a strategic lever for economic, security, and geopolitical power, while governance remains reactive and the private sector is asserting itself as the new power broker. The gap between innovation and institutional capacity has rarely been wider.

Key developments CIGI highlights: the US Securities and Exchange Commission has approved tokenised stocks and bonds for 24/7 trading in 2026, opening a pathway to broader tokenisation of real-world assets. AI is being used increasingly not just in products but in governance itself — for strategic foresight, algorithmic policy design, and AI-powered causal analysis. At the same time, without coordinated global action, cyberspace and outer space risk becoming arenas of instability rather than shared commons.

Why this matters → For planetary governance thinkers, the CIGI analysis points to a structural problem: the global institutions designed to coordinate policy were built for a slower-moving world. The digital layer of planetary governance — who controls the infrastructure, who sets the standards, who governs AI — is being decided right now, largely without democratic input.

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digitalaigovernancetechnologyglobal governancedata

Three-minute videos shift democratic understanding across 33 countries

A large-scale experiment finds that brief online videos explaining democratic principles — rights, checks and balances, accountability — measurably strengthen support for democracy and reduce acceptance of authoritarian alternatives, even among the politically disengaged.

Democracy is increasingly contested not in institutions alone, but in language and understanding. Research shows that citizens worldwide often reduce democracy to elections and majority rule, neglecting the liberal principles — judicial independence, minority rights, institutional checks — that distinguish democratic governance from illiberal majoritarianism. This conceptual erosion matters: when democracy means only voting, authoritarian actors can claim democratic legitimacy while dismantling its substance.

A new study across 33 countries and more than 40,000 participants tested whether short, online civic education videos could shift democratic attitudes. The intervention was minimal — animated three-minute explanations of core democratic principles. The results were consistent: even a single video increased factual knowledge, strengthened support for democracy, and reduced acceptance of authoritarian alternatives. Effects appeared across both democracies and autocracies, with the strongest impact among young people and the politically disengaged.

Why this matters → This is not transformative practice in the sense of institutional redesign, but it touches something adjacent: the substrate of democratic culture. If governance systems must be felt and tested rather than merely debated, they must first be understood — and that understanding, it turns out, can be cultivated at scale. Digital civic education is a tool, not a solution, but one that merits attention from movements working to renew democratic systems under pressure.

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Democracy Without Borders
democratic innovationgovernanceresearchdigital toolscivic education

Trump AI Policy Framework Overrides Local Consent on Data Center Expansion

New federal AI policy fast-tracks data center permits while stripping local governments of oversight — a test case for whether infrastructure governance flows from communities or concentrates upward with federal and corporate power.

The Trump Administration's National Policy Framework for AI accelerates data center construction by streamlining federal permits and preempting state and local authority — a move that KD Chavez, executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance, calls "a direct attack on local democracy." The framework shifts infrastructure costs to ratepayers while consolidating decision-making power at the federal level, undermining the capacity of frontline communities to shape what gets built in their jurisdictions.

The governance architecture here is revealing. By routing approval through federal agencies rather than municipal or regional bodies, the policy bypasses the terrain where communities can exercise democratic oversight. Chavez notes the material consequences: higher electricity bills, diverted freshwater, new pollution burdens — all imposed without local consent. "AI doesn't run on 'the cloud,'" she said. "It runs on power plants, water withdrawals, land grabs, and lots and lots of pollution."

Why this matters → This is governance as extraction: centralizing control, externalizing harm, and foreclosing the possibility that communities might choose otherwise. Whether such systems can be reconfigured — or must be opposed outright — remains an open question for those building governance from below.

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Climate Justice Alliance
governanceclimatedemocratic innovationinfrastructureenvironmental justice

Can ecological collapse be undone? China's Yangtze experiment offers an answer

A decade-long commercial fishing ban across the Yangtze basin — affecting an area the size of Mexico — shows early signs of reversing biodiversity loss. The scale of intervention required reveals what ecological restoration actually demands.

China's 2021 commercial fishing ban across the entire Yangtze River basin stands as the largest freshwater fishery closure in history. The river had become a symbol of ecological collapse: catches plummeted from over 400,000 tons in the 1950s to just 66,000 tons by 2016, driven by damming, mining, pollution, and overfishing. The Yangtze river dolphin vanished. The finless porpoise population fell below 500. Now, a new study in *Science* shows fish biomass has more than doubled and species diversity increased 13% in just the first few years of the ban — including recovering populations of three endangered species.

The research team surveyed 57 two-kilometer sections of river before and after the ban, netting over 47,000 fish across 115 species while tracking water quality, land use, and weather patterns. When they isolated variables, the fishing ban emerged as the overwhelming driver of recovery. This offers evidence that even heavily altered ecosystems can regenerate when given respite — but also reveals the scale of intervention required. Over 100,000 fishing boats were removed and more than 230,000 fishers relocated. China has invested over $300 billion in ecological restoration across the basin over the past decade.

Why this matters → The results matter as a test case for whether governance systems can reverse, not merely slow, ecological decline. But researchers warn that habitat loss — which accounts for roughly 70% of the basin's biodiversity decline, compared to 30% from overfishing — remains unaddressed. Dams still fragment the river. Climate change continues altering water flows. And the ban expires in 2031. As the authors note, commercial fishing could easily undo this progress. The Yangtze experiment demonstrates both the possibility of restoration and the political commitment it demands — not as policy proposal, but as lived consequence for hundreds of thousands of people and one of the world's most economically vital watersheds.

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Future Earth
ecological stewardshipgovernancebiodiversityrestorationchina

Kiss the Ground Grants $500K to 215 Farms, Shifting 73,000 Acres to Regeneration

Direct grants to small-scale farmers reduced transition risk for regenerative practices across 73,000 US acres in 2025. Now the work shifts from capital deployment to storytelling — connecting eaters to the human systems behind soil governance.

Kiss the Ground distributed $500,000 in direct grants to 215 small farms and ranches across the United States in 2025, supporting the transition of 73,000 acres to regenerative management. The grants funded equipment, supplies, and training — practical infrastructure that reduces financial risk during the vulnerable transition period when farmers shift from extractive to restorative practices.

The model is instructive: ecological transformation requires more than knowledge transfer. It demands patient capital, peer networks, and mechanisms that absorb risk during system redesign. These grants function as a form of distributed governance — allocating resources to steward land through practices that rebuild soil carbon, water retention, and biodiversity rather than mining them.

Why this matters → In 2026, the organization is pivoting from capital deployment to narrative work, profiling the farmers themselves and launching an expanded Regenerative Farm Map to connect eaters directly to local producers. An April 14 virtual meet-up will feature Q&A with grant recipients, hosted by chef Gina Bruno. The shift reflects a recognition that land stewardship is not only technical but relational — governance systems require connection between those who eat and those who tend the soil that feeds them.

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Kiss the Ground
regenerative agriculturefundingland stewardshipecological governancefarmer grants

The Bioplastics Trade-off: Climate Gains, Biodiversity Losses

New lifecycle analysis reveals bioplastics reduce carbon but harm ecosystems more than fossil alternatives — a material governance challenge where the only path to climate targets involves reducing demand itself.

A comprehensive lifecycle analysis comparing five bio-based and seven fossil-based polymers has quantified what material scientists suspected: bioplastics cut carbon footprints by roughly half, but inflict several times more damage to ecosystem quality. The reason is straightforward — growing sugarcane, corn, or even agricultural waste requires converting natural ecosystems to farmland, plus the fertilizer and water inputs that come with cultivation.

The trade-offs run deeper. Food-crop-based plastics harm ecosystems more than waste-derived alternatives, but waste-to-plastic processes consume more energy and reduce climate benefits. And critically, the choice between bio-based or fossil-derived polymers matters far less for ecosystem damage from improper disposal than how long the material persists in the environment — a governance question about waste systems, not material origins.

Why this matters → The researchers name what governance systems often avoid: "Simply substituting materials is insufficient. Ultimately, reducing demand for single-use packaging is essential." It's a reminder that planetary stewardship sometimes means managing downward — testing whether societies can govern abundance as rigorously as they pursue it.

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Future Earth
ecological stewardshipclimatematerial governancebiodiversitydemand reduction

Water governance standard launches in Tokyo with emphasis on felt practice

The Alliance for Water Stewardship released Version 3.0 of its certification standard at Suntory's Tokyo headquarters, bringing stakeholder engagement and catchment-level planning to corporate water management across the Asia-Pacific region.

The Alliance for Water Stewardship launched Version 3.0 of its certification standard on March 18 in Tokyo — not as a policy paper, but as a practitioner gathering at Suntory's headquarters, complete with corporate implementers, NGO observers, and auditors who actually verify compliance on the ground. The revision arrives as Japan's corporate water stewardship network gains momentum, with companies like Chugai Pharmaceutical already navigating the certification process.

The updated standard emphasizes stakeholder engagement across all five implementation steps and requires organizations to define their "catchments of relevance" — the watersheds where their operations create dependencies and risks. This shift from site-level to catchment-level thinking represents a governance practice that must be mapped, negotiated, and verified rather than simply declared. Tyler Farrow, AWS Standards Manager, walked attendees through how to set water stewardship plans by understanding impacts and shared water challenges in specific geographies.

Why this matters → The Tokyo launch signals growing traction for formalized water governance in the Asia-Pacific region, where the Japan Water Stewardship initiative is building a network of committed organizations. Whether corporate certification schemes can meaningfully address shared watershed challenges remains an open question, but the emphasis on catchment-level planning and stakeholder engagement suggests a recognition that water governance cannot happen in isolation.

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Alliance for Water Stewardship
watercorporate governancejapanstandardsecological stewardship

Carceral Education as Social Innovation: Stephanie Fanfan's Research

A PhD student at Learning Planet Institute examines how education within prisons shapes justice capital and institutional recognition — testing whether carceral systems can transform or merely replicate inequality.

Stephanie Fanfan, a second-year doctoral researcher at Université Lumière Lyon 2's FIRE Doctoral School, is investigating a question that sits at the intersection of social innovation and governance: how education functions within carceral systems. Her work examines the distribution of what she terms "justice capital" — the institutional recognition and social resources that shape life trajectories within and beyond prison walls.

The research, housed within both the Centre Max Weber and Learning Planet Institute's Research Unit on Learning Transitions, treats carceral education not as a technical fix but as a site of governance experimentation. It asks whether educational programs can meaningfully redistribute power and recognition, or whether they reproduce the hierarchies they claim to address — a question relevant to any institution that positions learning as transformative.

Why this matters → Fanfan's positioning as an Afro-Caribbean scholar brings particular salience to this inquiry. The research emerges from Learning Planet Institute's broader investigation into how learning systems intersect with social innovation policy, recognizing that governance innovations must be tested in the spaces where inequality is most concentrated, not just debated in seminar rooms.

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Learning Planet Institute
researchsocial innovationeducationjusticegovernance

EnergyNet and the Governance of Local Power

Viable Cities explores how local energy systems can reshape urban climate action — not just as infrastructure, but as participatory governance. The EnergyNet model, tested in Lund, treats energy as a coordinated system involving households, property owners, and municipalities.

Viable Cities has published a new outlook examining how local energy systems might become a foundational element of climate-neutral cities. The report describes EnergyNet as a system architecture integrating local production, storage, flexibility, and digital coordination — a shift from centralized grids to participatory infrastructure that households, property owners, and communities can actively shape.

The concept has been developed and tested in Lund, Sweden, through a system demonstrator involving municipalities, property owners, energy companies, and researchers. The Lund trials show how local systems can complement existing infrastructure while strengthening both resilience and cost-effectiveness — and, crucially, how they create new forms of participation in energy transition. This is governance tested in practice, not merely designed on paper.

Why this matters → Jonas Birgersson and Göran Persson will discuss the theme on stage at Transition Lab Forum Live on March 25, focusing on how cities can take a more active role in shaping future energy systems.

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Viable Cities
energygovernancenordicdemocratic innovationclimate

Global democracy returns to 1978 levels as autocratization accelerates

V-Dem's annual assessment finds 74% of humanity now lives under autocracy, with 44 countries actively autocratizing. The US loses liberal democracy status as freedom of expression and legislative constraints deteriorate worldwide.

The V-Dem Institute's 2026 report offers a sobering metric: democracy for the average global citizen has regressed to 1978 levels, nearly erasing the gains of the third wave of democratization. Of 179 countries assessed, 92 are now autocracies compared to 87 democracies — a reversal that places 6 billion people, 74% of the world's population, under authoritarian rule. Only 600 million live in liberal democracies, fewer than those in closed autocracies.

The numbers reveal acceleration, not equilibrium. Forty-four countries are actively autocratizing, affecting 41% of the global population — a record for the current wave. Just 18 countries, representing 5% of humanity, are democratizing. Botswana, Guatemala, and Mauritius joined this smaller group in 2025, while ten countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Italy, and Slovenia entered autocratization. V-Dem notes that 28 of the 44 autocratizers were democracies when decline began; 15 have already broken down entirely.

Why this matters → This is not merely data about governance systems — it's evidence that the infrastructure for democratic experimentation, the conditions under which communities can negotiate planetary-scale challenges, is contracting. When legislative constraints collapse and expression is suppressed, the capacity for collective sense-making degrades. What remains are not just diminished rights, but diminished possibility for the iterative, participatory governance practices that planetary stewardship requires.

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Democracy Without Borders
democracygovernanceautocracydemocratic innovationresearch

Phage research as governance practice: learning from living systems

A doctoral researcher at FIRE examines bacteriophages to understand life's fundamental coupling of form and function — a question with implications for how we design adaptive, living governance systems.

Milena Milovanović, a second-year PhD student at the FIRE Doctoral School, is studying bacteriophages — viruses that infect bacteria — to understand the intrinsic coupling between genotype and phenotype. Her thesis, "Gaining insight to intrinsic phage genotype-phenotype coupling to drive disruptive novel protein," sits at the intersection of molecular biology and fundamental questions about what constitutes life.

The work matters beyond the lab bench. Understanding how simple biological systems couple information with function — how genetic code translates directly into adaptive behavior — offers a model for governance systems that can respond to changing conditions without top-down control. Phages are minimal entities that nevertheless exhibit sophisticated adaptation, a quality that designed institutions often lack.

Why this matters → FIRE (Frontiers in Innovation, Research and Education) represents a mode of doctoral training that connects disciplinary expertise with broader planetary questions. When not researching, Milovanović tends plants and walks Paris — practices of attention that mirror the close observation her work requires. The Garden's thesis holds that governance must be felt and tested in the world, not merely theorized; studying how living systems actually work, at the molecular level, is one way to ground that practice.

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Learning Planet Institute
researchlearning planetsystems thinkingeducation

Portrait: Chloé Anna Höllerer enters FIRE's doctoral cohort

A new PhD student joins the FIRE Doctoral School at Learning Planet Institute, bringing a background in agronomy and molecular biology to questions of research and learning systems. Another researcher entering the work of governance experimentation.

Chloé Anna Höllerer has joined the FIRE Doctoral School as a first-year PhD student, following a trajectory from Berlin through Paris and Rennes. Her training spans agronomy and molecular and cellular biology — a grounding in the life sciences that now meets the Learning Planet Institute's efforts to redesign research and learning systems themselves.

The FIRE program positions doctoral work not merely as disciplinary specialization but as an opportunity to test new forms of knowledge production. It's part of a broader pattern: institutions beginning to treat their own structures as experimental substrates, recognizing that governance of research may require the same rigor as research itself.

Why this matters → The interview offers few details of Höllerer's specific research questions, but her presence signals the steady accumulation of practitioners willing to work at the edges of established systems — where agronomy meets pedagogy, where molecular methods meet institutional design. These are the quiet beginnings of larger transformations.

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Learning Planet Institute
researchlearningdoctoral educationinstitutional design

Water stewardship standard revised to meet catchment-scale governance demands

The Alliance for Water Stewardship releases Version 3.0 of its certification framework, refining how corporations engage with watershed governance beyond efficiency metrics — a shift toward catchment-scale accountability as water becomes boardroom risk.

The Alliance for Water Stewardship has released Version 3.0 of its International Water Stewardship Standard, refining a decade-old certification framework that now guides corporate water practice across brands from Nestlé to Samsung. The revision — shaped by 3,000 comments from over 100 organizations and adopted with 93 percent member support in December 2025 — arrives as one in five companies report significant water-related supply chain risks, with tens of billions in value exposure.

What makes this relevant to governance is the standard's insistence on catchment-scale thinking rather than site-level efficiency alone. Certified sites must engage with local communities and watershed priorities, moving corporate water management from an internal metric to a form of participation in shared resource governance. Third-party auditors verify these commitments — a governance performance that regulators increasingly recognize, particularly under the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and its ESRS E3 water requirements.

Why this matters → The Tokyo launch ahead of UN World Water Day positions the standard within a broader shift — water moving from operations issue to board-level risk, from efficiency target to governance imperative. Whether certification translates to genuine watershed stewardship or becomes another compliance ritual remains an open question, one that AWS's 3,000 commenters and participating brands are now tasked with answering in practice.

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Alliance for Water Stewardship
watergovernancecorporate accountabilityecological stewardshipcertification

Small states, strength in numbers: rebuilding human rights multilateralism

As great powers fragment the UN human rights system, a coalition of 90 countries — half from the global south — is testing whether one-country-one-vote can still anchor planetary governance in shared rules rather than fortress politics.

Mark Carney's Davos admission that the world is reorganising around great-power competition outside UN rules wasn't news to those watching UN human rights spaces — it was simply candour. The latest ruptures, from Trump's imperial impulses to China's methodical defunding campaigns, have pushed what was structural into the open. The enforcement of international law has always relied less on policing than on moral leverage and political will, and both are eroding fast: slashed aid budgets, weakened economies, frayed credibility over double standards in Gaza and elsewhere.

But human rights multilateralism has never depended solely on great-power benevolence. It was also built on truth-seeking, public pressure, and committed movements — and on the one-country-one-vote principle that gives small and medium states real leverage. That history is now being reclaimed. Last week, Albania, the Netherlands, Chile, Kyrgyzstan, and Kenya rallied 90 countries — half from the global south — in a joint pledge at the Human Rights Council to defend the independence and effectiveness of UN rights bodies. In New York, small island states like Mauritius and Cabo Verde are joining Latin American nations to resist Chinese and Russian budget cuts targeting human rights work.

Why this matters → What it demands is political courage to confront violations everywhere, from Gaza to Xinjiang to Minnesota; vision that transcends electoral cycles; partnership with frontline civil society; and funding — not as charity, but as infrastructure for a safer, more just planetary order. The UN remains a rare space for dialogue among governments, able to investigate atrocities the Security Council ignores. Dismissing it as broken misses the whole truth. The question is whether states are willing to use the power they already hold.

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Democracy Without Borders
governancehuman rightsmultilateralismun systemdemocratic innovation

Rewilding as governance in Ukraine's Danube Delta

A new documentary shows how rewilding in Ukraine's Danube Delta operates as both ecological restoration and social healing — restoring natural processes while offering veterans and communities a lived practice of renewal amid war.

Emmanuel Rondeau's documentary "The Danube Delta and the Healing Power of Nature" — premiering March 20 for World Rewilding Day — documents something more complex than conservation. In the Ukrainian portion of the delta, rewilding work operates as a form of applied governance: removing dykes to restore water flow, reintroducing water buffalo and Konik horses to reshape grasslands, and creating conditions where both ecosystems and war-affected communities can practice recovery.

The film follows Rewilding Ukraine's work across Ermakiv Island and the Tarutino Steppe, where the team has developed a Nature for Veterans programme that brings traumatized soldiers into direct contact with recovering landscapes. "I will never forget the voices of one group when they saw water buffalo and Konik horses in the delta for the first time," says team leader Oleg Dyakov. "Being in wild nature allowed them to forget about any problems — and they could take a feeling of hope and calmness back home." This is governance as felt experience, not policy document.

Why this matters → The project extends beyond the 8,000 hectares of wetland restoration planned for 2026. Local screenings in Vylkove and Borodino will bring the documentary to 250 children, accompanied by photo exhibitions and community workshops. Planned reintroductions include kulan, marmots, and eagle owls — each species return a test of whether human and ecological systems can share space under wartime conditions. The Danube Delta work suggests that ecological stewardship and social healing might be inseparable practices, each requiring the other to succeed.

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Rewilding Europe
rewildingecological stewardshipukrainecommunity practiceveterans

Tharaka's River of Life: eco-cultural mapping as governance practice

The Tharaka community in Kenya adapts Amazonian mapping methods to create Life Plans — participatory governance tools that weave seed sovereignty, sacred site protection, and customary law into a holistic vision of territorial stewardship.

The Tharaka community at the foothills of Mount Kenya has become the first in Africa to complete Life Plans using eco-cultural mapping — a methodology developed by Indigenous peoples in the Colombian Amazon in the 1980s and shared through the African Earth Jurisprudence Collective. The process begins with elder-centred dialogues that surface pre-colonial memory, then produces three layered maps: one of the ancestral past, one of the colonial present, and one charting a desired future. Seasonal calendars tracking constellations, moon cycles, and ritual timing accompany these spatial maps, creating what the community calls their "River of Life" — a governance document structured around the Kithino River they live beside.

Into this river flow distinct streams of work: reviving indigenous seed varieties resistant to drought, restoring rotational grazing systems called Marithia, protecting Sacred Natural Sites through customary law, and rebuilding the Gaaru — traditional meeting places where elders teach ecological governance during rites of passage. Each stream represents a specific practice; together they form an interdependent system. As elder Salome Gatumi notes of hybrid seeds: "You are farming for the corporations, not yourself." The revival prioritizes autonomy — over food, land, knowledge, and governance structures.

Why this matters → The approach echoes The Garden's thesis that governance must be tested in practice. By weaving seed sovereignty, sacred site protection, shift grazing, and intergenerational learning into a single river, Tharaka demonstrates how planetary stewardship emerges not from isolated interventions but from the revival of holistic, place-based systems — systems that recognize ecological and cultural health as inseparable.

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Gaia Foundation
rights of naturegovernanceindigenous knowledgeterritorial stewardshipparticipatory mapping

Two rewilding initiatives join pan-European network, expanding into Greece and Türkiye

The European Rewilding Network adds CALLISTO and Marine Rewilding Türkiye to its roster of over 100 initiatives — one focused on human-carnivore coexistence, the other on coastal ecosystem recovery. Both embed local communities in restoration governance.

Rewilding Europe's network now counts more than 100 initiatives across the continent, with two recent additions marking its expansion into Greece and Türkiye. CALLISTO, founded in 2004, works on coexistence between people and large carnivores — brown bears and grey wolves — in Greek mountain landscapes. Marine Rewilding Türkiye, led by the Mediterranean Conservation Foundation, focuses on seascape restoration along the Turkish coast, embedding small-scale fishers and cooperatives in marine governance and enforcement.

Both initiatives exemplify a governance model that goes beyond top-down conservation: CALLISTO uses electric fencing, waste management, and community engagement to enable shared landscapes; Marine Rewilding Türkiye trains local fishers as marine rangers and partners them with scientists in monitoring and protection. "Community-based governance is central to this approach," the initiative notes — a recognition that ecological recovery requires redistributing authority, not just funding.

Why this matters → The network's growth — now spanning terrestrial and marine landscapes, from the Apennines to the Aegean — suggests that rewilding is less a singular technique than a family of approaches unified by a commitment to testing what works, in place, with the people who live there. Whether that qualifies as governance innovation or simply good practice may depend on whether such models can be institutionalized beyond the project cycle.

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Rewilding Europe
rewildingcoexistencemarine governancecommunity stewardshipecological restoration

Global Challenges Foundation opens 2026 call for governance reform proposals

The Swedish foundation behind the New Shape Prize has announced a new round of funding for proposals that address gaps in planetary-scale governance. This cycle emphasises prototyping over theory — a shift that aligns closely with The Garden's approach.

The Global Challenges Foundation, based in Stockholm, has opened its 2026 call for governance innovation proposals. Unlike previous rounds, which favoured policy papers and theoretical frameworks, the foundation now explicitly invites working prototypes and simulation-based approaches.

This shift toward experiential governance design resonates with The Garden's core thesis: that governance systems must be felt and tested, not merely debated. The foundation's network spans researchers, policymakers, and practitioners across 60+ countries, making it a significant node in the planetary governance landscape.

Why this matters → The call closes in September 2026. Proposals are evaluated on feasibility, scalability, and alignment with existential risk reduction.

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Global Challenges Foundation
governancefundingnordic

Decommodifying land in Philadelphia — governance from the ground up

Community land trusts in Kensington and beyond are testing whether neighborhoods can govern their own futures against displacement. It's hyperlocal democratic innovation with a clear thesis: ownership structures are governance structures.

In Kensington, a Philadelphia neighborhood that survived decades as an opioid epicenter only to face gentrification, residents are testing a different ownership model. The Kensington Corridor Trust — a community-led nonprofit — now controls 31 properties along Kensington Avenue, renting them at below-market rates to keep longtime residents in place as luxury condos rise nearby. It's governance through property ownership, a direct challenge to the logic that neighborhoods must simply endure whatever capital decides.

The model is spreading. Grounded Solutions Network launched a fund in 2024 that mimics private equity tactics — buying single-family homes in bulk, roughly 300 in the Twin Cities last year — then offering local land trusts first rights to purchase as homes become vacant. It's an infrastructure play for decommodification, creating the financial muscle community groups typically lack. In Kensington, the trust bought eight commercial properties in 2024 and is opening an 800-square-foot grocery store this year, operator from the neighborhood, carrying the fresh produce residents have been asking for.

Why this matters → This is governance innovation at its most concrete: who owns the land determines who gets to stay, what gets built, and whose vision of community prevails. Community land trusts aren't debating housing policy — they're enacting it, building the alternative infrastructure while the market does what markets do. Whether this scales beyond hundreds of properties to reshape entire urban systems remains the open question, but the governance logic is clear: ownership is power, and power can be structured differently.

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Grounded Solutions Network
democratic innovationgovernanceland stewardshipurban systemscommunity ownership

Agroecology Europe seeks administration officer to anchor European food transition

The Brussels-based network coordinating Europe's agroecological transition is hiring operations capacity — a quiet signal of organizational maturity in a movement linking farmers, researchers, and activists across borders.

Agroecology Europe, the 200-member network coordinating Europe's transition toward ecologically grounded farming systems, is recruiting an Administration & Finance Officer based in Brussels. The nine-month contract — dependent on funding, with potential extension — reflects the organization's trajectory from coalition to operational entity managing EU-funded projects, membership administration, and cross-border coordination.

Founded in 2016, the network brings together farmers, NGOs, students, and academics around a shared challenge: how to move agroecology from research practice to European policy architecture. The role's responsibilities — CRM systems, payroll, membership onboarding, EU grant reporting — reveal the infrastructural work beneath any governance transition. Someone must maintain the databases, organize the meetings, track the renewals.

Why this matters → It's a reminder that transformative practice requires administrative capacity. Networks need anchoring. Movements need infrastructure. Even — especially — those reimagining how humans grow food.

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Agroecology Europe
agroecologyeuropegovernancefood systemsorganizational infrastructure

Nestlé certifies all bottling sites under AWS Standard — but what counts as stewardship?

Nestlé's achievement of AWS certification across 39 bottling sites raises deeper questions about how corporations govern shared water resources — and whether certification frameworks can transform extraction into genuine stewardship.

Nestlé has certified all 39 of its owned bottling sites to the Alliance for Water Stewardship Standard, becoming the first global corporation to meet such a commitment. The achievement — reached through what Mickaël Clément, Head of Water Stewardship at Nestlé Waters, calls "boots in the watershed" rather than headquarters directives — involved 70 projects across 20 countries, from reforestation to wetland regeneration to water infrastructure improvements.

The AWS Standard operates as a governance framework that moves beyond corporate compliance, requiring companies to engage local stakeholders, assess shared water challenges, and implement context-specific interventions. Clément emphasizes that "water is a global issue, its stewardship must be handled at local level" — a principle that echoes broader questions about how planetary-scale challenges require watershed-specific governance models that can be felt and tested by communities, not merely certified from above.

Why this matters → Yet the tension remains visible: a company built on extracting and bottling groundwater now frames itself as returning "more water than we use" through nature-based projects. The Standard's Version 3.0, launching this month, aims for "more pragmatic" adoption to scale impact — a shift that will test whether certification can genuinely transform corporate water governance or simply provide legitimacy for continued extraction. Nestlé's next challenge isn't achieving certification but maintaining it across dozens of sites while expanding regeneration work, a task that reveals water stewardship as ongoing practice rather than fixed achievement.

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Alliance for Water Stewardship
waterstewardshipcorporate governancecertificationcommons

Tanzania trains public officials in water stewardship as Dar es Salaam rations supply

As drought forces weekly water rationing in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania launches water stewardship training for 30+ public officials — an experiment in building trust-based governance between state agencies and private actors around shared catchments.

Tanzania's rapid industrialization has collided with ecological limits. By late 2025, Dar es Salaam — one of the country's largest cities — was rationing water to once a week for some households, sometimes less. The drought exposed compounding failures: aging infrastructure, untreated industrial discharge, climate-intensified droughts and floods. Other Tanzanian cities face similar crises.

In February 2026, the Alliance for Water Stewardship delivered a two-day training to more than 30 public sector participants in Dar es Salaam — officials from the Ministry of Water Resources, the Vice President's Office, basin boards, and ministries spanning fisheries, industry, and trade. Participants came from Dar es Salaam, Tanga, Mwanza, and Dodoma. The training, part of the GIZ Green and Smart Cities SASA program developed with LeafTurtle, was adapted to Tanzania's specific water governance challenges.

Why this matters → AWS plans continued engagement with participants over coming months to assess how stewardship frameworks align with national water targets. The question isn't just whether officials learn the concepts, but whether new relationships actually form around shared basins — and whether those relationships translate into measurable governance outcomes when the next drought arrives.

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Alliance for Water Stewardship
watergovernanceafricacapacity buildingecological stewardship

U.S. Senate Passes Housing Act Centering Shared Equity Models

Bipartisan legislation elevates community land trusts and shared equity programs to federal policy — testing whether ownership models that prioritize stewardship over speculation can operate at scale.

The U.S. Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act with overwhelming bipartisan support, elevating shared equity housing models — including community land trusts — to explicit eligibility for federal funding. The legislation, led by Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-SC) and Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), also reauthorizes the HOME Investment Partnerships Program and pilots an owner-occupied repair program.

The bill represents a rare federal acknowledgment that housing governance might require fundamentally different ownership structures. Shared equity programs, which Grounded Solutions Network has championed through its 200-plus member organizations, separate land ownership from building ownership to maintain affordability across generations — a model that treats housing as infrastructure rather than commodity.

Why this matters → The legislation also incentivizes local land use reform, though details remain vague. Doug Ryan, Vice President of Housing Policy at Grounded Solutions Network, noted the bill includes "many of our key priorities" while acknowledging "there is still work to be done" as it moves to reconciliation with the House. Whether federal programs can genuinely support alternative ownership models — or merely accommodate them at the margins — remains the practical test.

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Grounded Solutions Network
housingdemocratic innovationgovernanceshared equityland stewardship

Testing Resilience Infrastructure in Cities Rebuilt from Disaster

A three-year transnational project examines how nature-based infrastructure performs in post-disaster cities across Japan, Sweden, and Poland — treating urban recovery as a testing ground for ecological governance under stress.

Researchers from Tokyo, Stockholm, and Lodz gathered in February to launch a three-year study of nature-based infrastructure in cities recovering from disasters and conflict. The project, coordinated through Future Earth's Urban Knowledge-Action Network, focuses on how green infrastructure performs not just as ecological restoration but as social cohesion infrastructure — integrating civic ecology practices, multigenerational healing, and community-led recovery.

The Tokyo kickoff included a field visit to coastal Tohoku, where participants examined memorial sites, reconstructed coastal parks with evacuation functions, and compact public housing in Shinchi (Fukushima) and neighboring municipalities. These sites, rebuilt after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, offer concrete evidence of how disaster recovery intersects with population aging and demographic decline — conditions that stress-test the viability of nature-based approaches under real-world constraints.

Why this matters → The consortium brings together The University of Tokyo, Stockholm Resilience Centre, and the University of Lodz's Social-Ecological Systems Analysis Lab. By treating urban recovery as a governance laboratory, the project aligns with The Garden's thesis that systems must be tested and felt, not merely theorized. Collaboration with municipalities, NGOs, and networks like ICLEI aims to ensure findings translate beyond policy papers into implemented practice.

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Future Earth
urban governancenature based solutionsdisaster recoverycivic ecologyresearch

Rewilding loan tests whether nature recovery can anchor rural economies

A €40,000 loan from Rewilding Europe Capital enables a Portuguese nature tourism company to expand accommodation in the Greater Côa Valley — testing whether financial tools can align ecological restoration with economic viability in depopulating rural regions.

In Portugal's Greater Côa Valley, nature recovery is being deliberately engineered to drive economic transformation. Rewilding Europe Capital — the enterprise loan facility of Rewilding Europe — has issued a €40,000 loan to Ambieduca, a nature tourism company founded by biologist and archaeologist Marco Ferraz. The investment will fund renovation of a traditional house in Vilar de Amargo, creating accommodation for visitors drawn to one of the Iberian Peninsula's wildest landscapes. The project represents a deliberate experiment: can targeted finance turn ecological restoration into durable livelihoods in regions marked by rural depopulation?

Ambieduca already operates guided experiences — wildlife watching, tours of prehistoric rock engravings, visits to active rewilding sites — that blend natural history with cultural heritage. The new accommodation, branded "Casas de Villar-Rewilding Spot," will allow Ferraz to offer integrated packages and potentially hire locally. The company is part of the Wild Côa Network, a coalition of nearly 60 nature-positive businesses launched by Rewilding Portugal in 2021. Three network members have now received loans from Rewilding Europe Capital, creating a live testing ground for whether collaborative enterprise models can sustain themselves on the economic externalities of restored ecosystems.

Why this matters → The Greater Côa Valley case is interesting because it makes the economic logic of rewilding explicit and measurable. Tourism revenue becomes a proxy for ecological health; loan repayment tracks whether nature-based enterprises can survive without subsidy. Rewilding Europe's Daniel Veríssimo notes that accommodation remains scarce in northern villages like Vilar de Amargo, where depopulation has left infrastructure gaps — the new property addresses both market demand and demographic decline. Whether this model scales beyond charismatic landscapes to more contested geographies remains an open question, but the Côa Valley is building a dataset on what happens when governance tools — finance, networks, platforms — are designed to make nature recovery economically legible.

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Rewilding Europe
rewildingecological financerural governanceportugalnature based economies

Testing governance in soil: herbs, certification, and practiced resilience

Kyle Bliffert's journey through the supplement industry traces a shift from theoretical wellness to practiced ecological stewardship. At Gaia Herbs' 270-acre Regenerative Organic Certified farm, governance becomes tangible — tested by hurricanes and fire alike.

The supplement industry has grown from $5 billion to over $60 billion in three decades, but Kyle Bliffert's trajectory suggests something more interesting than market expansion. His path — from commercial real estate to Metabolic Maintenance, Pure Encapsulations, and now Gaia Herbs — tracks a movement toward governance systems you can taste, certify, and rebuild after disaster.

Gaia Herbs operates on nearly 270 acres in North Carolina's Blue Ridge foothills, holding Regenerative Organic Certification — a standard that functions as practiced governance, not merely principle. When Hurricane Helene flooded Asheville in October 2024, the operation went dark for weeks. When fire struck the main manufacturing facility in January 2025, production stopped for 87 days. Bliffert's account is matter-of-fact: they did the right things, were tested, and are fully operational again. This is governance as felt experience — ecological and organizational resilience measured not in policy documents but in recovery time.

Why this matters → Bliffert's favorite formula is berberine with milk thistle for digestive support, but the more revealing detail is his nightly ashwagandha routine — backed by a recently published clinical study. The industry has moved from anecdote to evidence, from generic farms to named creeks. Cathy's Creek runs through Gaia's property. The governance is in the water.

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Kiss the Ground
ecological stewardshipcertificationregenerative agricultureresiliencepracticed governance

Metagov publishes framework for interoperable governance across digital and physical spaces

The research collective has released a working paper proposing standards for governance tool interoperability — enabling rules and processes to flow between online communities, DAOs, and physical assemblies.

Metagov's latest publication addresses a problem at the heart of distributed governance: how do you make governance decisions in one context legible and actionable in another? Their proposed framework introduces a "governance primitive" abstraction layer — a set of minimal, composable building blocks that can represent votes, proposals, delegations, and disputes across platforms.

The implications for The Garden are direct. If governance simulations are to bridge the gap between experiential learning and real institutional change, they need a shared language that connects game spaces to decision-making spaces. Metagov's primitives could serve as that translation layer.

Why this matters → The research collective continues to operate as an open network, with contributors from Stanford, MIT, and independent governance labs worldwide.

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Metagov
governance techresearchinteroperability

Democracy Without Borders releases brochure on global cooperation

Democracy Without Borders has published a new brochure examining pathways to reimagine global cooperation. The resource synthesizes emerging proposals for multilateral reform and democratic participation beyond borders.

Democracy Without Borders has released a brochure titled *Reimagining Global Cooperation*, adding to a growing body of work that asks how governance can scale beyond the nation-state without losing democratic legitimacy. The publication arrives as multilateral institutions face mounting criticism for their inability to address cascading crises — climate breakdown, migration flows, pandemic response — that refuse to respect territorial boundaries.

The brochure synthesizes proposals from recent reform debates: expanded UN representation, transnational citizens' assemblies, and mechanisms for binding global decision-making that include those most affected by planetary-scale challenges. It's part educational resource, part advocacy tool — designed for activists, policymakers, and civic organizations working at the intersection of democracy and internationalism.

Why this matters → What's notable here is the focus on *reimagining* rather than merely reforming. The framing suggests that incremental adjustments to 20th-century institutions may not suffice for 21st-century problems. Whether the proposals within can move from diagnosis to enactment remains the harder question — one that requires not just better ideas but the political will to test them in practice.

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Democracy Without Borders
democracygovernancemultilateralismdemocratic innovation

Agroecology Europe seeks communicator to bridge research and political practice

The Brussels-based network — 200 members spanning farmers, academics, and activists — is hiring a communications officer to strengthen its work placing agroecological transition on Europe's governance agenda.

Agroecology Europe, a decade-old association working to shift European food systems toward ecological principles, is searching for a communication and press officer to join its Brussels office. The role reflects a practical challenge facing many governance-oriented networks: how to translate technical knowledge and grassroots practice into policy influence.

The position — 80% time, minimum nine months with extension possible — requires someone who can manage social media, design graphics, organize events, and write for both specialist and public audiences. The job description emphasizes autonomy and strategic thinking, suggesting the role is less about executing a fixed plan and more about building communication infrastructure for a distributed movement.

Why this matters → The salary wasn't disclosed, and the role requires Belgian work authorization — practical constraints that shape who can participate in these Brussels-based efforts to influence European agricultural policy, even when the work itself concerns planetary-scale food system transformation.

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Agroecology Europe
agroecologygovernanceeuropefood systemsecological stewardship

New Jersey's PB Seeds program shows how advocacy training spreads democratic practice

A structured cohort model for participatory budgeting advocacy is generating new processes across New Jersey — including youth-led climate budgeting in Newark. Evaluations reveal what participants need to become effective democratic innovators.

The Participatory Budgeting Project's New Jersey PB Seeds program — now preparing its third cohort — demonstrates a replicable model for spreading democratic practice. Alumni from earlier cohorts have launched three new participatory budgeting processes, including a youth-led climate initiative in Newark. The program's structure matters: participants consistently praised the provision of actual tools and templates, noting they didn't have to "start from zero" when advocating in their communities.

Evaluations of the fall 2024 and summer 2025 cohorts reveal both momentum and unmet demand. All interviewed participants from the earlier cohort reported continued advocacy a year later — one securing grant funding, others organizing for municipal referenda. By program's end, participants who entered with minimal PB knowledge reported feeling "very" or "extremely confident" developing advocacy plans. Yet they consistently requested more training time and ongoing alumni convenings to sustain momentum.

Why this matters → This model exemplifies what The Garden calls transformative practice: governance change that requires not just new rules but new practitioners. The PB Seeds approach — structured training, peer networks, practical tools, ongoing support — treats democratic capacity-building as serious work requiring dedicated resources and longitudinal commitment.

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Participatory Budgeting Project
democratic innovationgovernanceparticipatory budgetingcivic infrastructureadvocacy

A New Index Sorts Regimes by How Power Actually Works

The Human Rights Foundation's Tyranny Tracker distinguishes democracies from hybrid and authoritarian regimes using qualitative thresholds — not aggregated scores — to capture the moment when democratic systems break down.

The Human Rights Foundation has launched the Tyranny Tracker, an index that classifies 179 countries and territories not by numerical scores but by qualitative thresholds: is electoral competition genuine? Can dissent function? Do institutions actually constrain executive power? The approach aims to capture what aggregated indices often miss — the moment when a democracy under pressure crosses into hybrid authoritarianism, where elections continue but transfer of power becomes "highly unlikely."

The distinction matters in practice. Thailand and Singapore are often coded as "flawed democracies" elsewhere, but the Tracker reclassifies them as hybrid authoritarian regimes because courts and legal mechanisms systematically prevent genuine political competition. Mexico, by contrast, remains democratic despite pressure — judicial capacity to constrain executive initiatives persists. Ukraine's wartime emergency governance, the researchers argue, shouldn't be confused with authoritarian consolidation, as contestation and oversight continue.

Why this matters → What's notable here is the emphasis on executive-led erosion and judicial independence — dimensions that matter for anyone interested in how governance systems actually function, not just how they're formally structured. Democracy, in this view, isn't a score but a set of capacities that can be present, weak, or absent. The question isn't where a country ranks, but whether power can genuinely change hands.

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Democracy Without Borders
governancedemocratic innovationaccountabilityindicators

U.S. Congress Considers Its Largest Housing Bill in Decades

The Senate is weighing the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which would expand community land trusts and shared equity models — governance experiments that treat housing as stewardship rather than speculation.

The U.S. Senate is considering what could become the country's largest housing legislation since the 1990s — a package that elevates community land trusts and shared equity homeownership from marginal experiments to federally recognized tools. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, now under deliberation after passing the House in February, emerged from rare bipartisan cooperation: the Senate Banking Committee's original ROAD to Housing Act passed 24-0 before being merged with House provisions.

The details matter here. The bill updates HOME Investment Partnerships to include a more flexible definition of community land trusts, one that no longer requires organizations to already hold land or seat homeowners on their boards — recognition that governance structures need room to develop. It also codifies preemptive purchase options for CLTs and explicitly adds shared equity homeownership to federal housing statute, treating these models not as workarounds but as legitimate approaches to a crisis driven partly by treating shelter as investment vehicle.

Why this matters → Whether this passes remains uncertain, but the legislative architecture is worth noting: governance models that began as grassroots practice — CLTs emerged from civil rights organizing in the 1960s — are being written into federal law not because they're trendy, but because they've proven resilient enough to test at scale.

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Grounded Solutions Network
housinggovernancedemocratic innovationcommunity land trustspolicy

Climate Justice Alliance Links Militarism to Climate Crisis in Iran Strike Statement

As U.S. and Israeli forces strike Iran, the Climate Justice Alliance frames military action as ecological governance failure — the U.S. military remains the world's largest institutional emitter while resource extraction drives geopolitical conflict.

The Climate Justice Alliance has condemned U.S. and Israeli preemptive strikes on Iran, arguing that military action directly undermines climate stabilization efforts. The statement points to a stark institutional reality: the U.S. military is the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, operating at a scale that dwarfs many nations' total emissions — even as the UN warns of global water bankruptcy and irreversible temperature thresholds.

The Alliance frames these strikes not as security policy but as resource extraction governance: a continuation of what it calls the U.S.'s "ongoing history of engaging in coups, occupations, and endless wars to control resource-rich countries, especially for oil and gas." Since 2025 alone, the Trump administration has conducted military operations across the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America — a pattern the statement explicitly links to fossil fuel access and regional destabilization.

Why this matters → This intervention raises a governance question rarely surfaced in foreign policy discourse: how do we account for the climate cost of military institutions themselves? The Alliance's call to "oppose war and militarism" isn't pacifism as moral stance but ecological necessity — a recognition that planetary stewardship requires dismantling the systems that treat resource extraction as grounds for violent intervention. The statement stands with frontline communities calling for immediate cessation of airstrikes, positioning demilitarization as climate governance.

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Climate Justice Alliance
climatemilitarismresource extractionfrontline communitiesecological governance

Agroecology's quiet spread across 33 European countries

A five-year mapping project documents hundreds of agroecological initiatives across Europe — from farming practices to living labs — showing how food system transformation happens through distributed experimentation rather than top-down policy.

The AE4EU project has completed a rare exercise in documenting governance innovation as it unfolds on the ground. Over five years, researchers mapped agroecological initiatives across 33 European countries — including farming practices, popular education programs, living labs, and social movements — tracking how food system transformation actually happens when communities decide not to wait for policy permission.

The final report, covering nine countries from Belgium to Switzerland, reveals what the project calls a "silent revolution": hundreds of dispersed experiments in ecological farming, consumer networks, and participatory research that share methods and principles while adapting to local conditions. The pattern matters more than any single initiative — it shows governance emerging through practice, tested in soil and seed rather than debated in abstraction.

Why this matters → This is governance as diffuse experimentation, where the act of mapping becomes part of the movement itself. By making these initiatives visible across borders, the project creates a network that didn't formally exist before, turning isolated practices into a legible alternative system.

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Agroecology Europe
agroecologyfood systemsdistributed governanceeuropetransformative practice

Corruption perceptions worsen as civic space contracts worldwide

Transparency International reports global corruption perceptions have fallen to their lowest level in over a decade, with shrinking civic space a common factor in declining scores. The trend reveals how governance legitimacy depends on openness.

The global average score on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index has fallen to 42 out of 100 — the lowest level in more than a decade. The CPI 2025, published in February and drawing on 13 independent data sources across 182 countries, finds that more than two-thirds of assessed territories score below 50, a threshold the organization associates with serious corruption problems. Only five countries now score above 80, down from 12 a decade ago.

The most striking pattern in the data links deteriorating scores to contracting civic space. In 36 of the 50 countries that have seen significant declines since 2012, restrictions on freedoms of expression, association, and assembly have intensified. The report notes that countries with more open civic environments consistently show lower corruption levels — a finding that underscores how governance legitimacy isn't simply about formal institutions, but about the breathing room for scrutiny and contestation.

Why this matters → The human cost appears starkly in the data on journalists. Since 2012, 829 journalists have been murdered in non-conflict zones worldwide, including 150 investigating corruption. Over 90% of these killings occurred in countries scoring below 50. Meanwhile, promising movement includes recent commitments from the UK, Norway, and six other countries to explore an International Anti-Corruption Court for prosecuting grand corruption — an institutional innovation that would treat large-scale graft as a matter for international jurisdiction, not merely national enforcement.

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Democracy Without Borders
governancecorruptioncivic spaceaccountabilitydemocratic innovation

Scottish rewilding lodge joins pan-European practitioner network

Ballintean Mountain Lodge, a 30-year rewilding experiment in the Cairngorms, joins the European Rewilding Network — a move that underscores how ecological restoration increasingly operates through distributed governance: peer learning, knowledge exchange, and practice-led networks rather than top-down mandates.

Ballintean Mountain Lodge, a 52-hectare property in Glen Feshie in the Scottish Highlands, has joined the European Rewilding Network — a continent-spanning community of more than 100 rewilding initiatives across nearly 30 countries. The lodge has been practicing process-led rewilding for three decades, long before the term entered mainstream conservation vocabulary, allowing native woodland, floodplain meadows, and river dynamics to recover with minimal intervention. Owned by conservation photographer Peter Cairns and his wife Amanda Flanagan, the property now hosts land managers, NGOs, and policymakers for immersive training experiences that blend demonstration with dialogue.

The European Rewilding Network functions as a peer-to-peer governance infrastructure — not regulatory, but relational. It's a model worth noting: ecological recovery distributed across borders, coordinated through shared practice rather than binding treaties. Cairns cites communication and wildlife coexistence as key motivations for joining, reflecting a broader recognition that rewilding's future depends less on technical fixes than on community engagement and stakeholder trust. Over the next decade, Ballintean plans to reintroduce semi-wild ponies, support beaver and water vole returns, and enhance Atlantic salmon populations — all while serving as a living case study for how private land can align with rewilding principles.

Why this matters → This is governance through demonstration and exchange — a network testing what works, learning from failure, and making knowledge travel. As rewilding matures from fringe concept to policy framework, initiatives like Ballintean offer something the policy sphere often lacks: grounded, patient, place-based practice that others can see, touch, and adapt. The lodge also features on Wilder Places, Rewilding Europe's tourism platform, linking ecological recovery to rural livelihoods — another reminder that governance isn't only about institutions, but about designing systems people can live within.

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Rewilding Europe
rewildingecological governancenetworksscotlandpractice led

Three Climate Justice Groups Challenge EPA's Erosion of Tribal and State Water Authority

A joint comment letter opposes EPA proposals that would weaken Section 401 of the Clean Water Act — the mechanism that allows states and Tribal Nations to condition or deny federal permits based on water quality standards.

The Climate Justice Alliance, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and GreenLatinos have submitted a formal comment opposing EPA proposals that would gut Section 401 of the Clean Water Act. The provision requires any federally permitted project that might discharge into U.S. waters to obtain water quality certification from the relevant state or Tribal Nation — a process that currently allows these sovereigns to conditionally approve or outright deny permits based on local water quality standards.

The proposed rollback represents more than regulatory weakening; it's a direct constraint on the governance capacity of states and Tribal Nations to protect their watersheds. Section 401 operates as a rare federal mechanism that distributes authority downward, requiring project proponents to negotiate with the jurisdictions whose waters they would affect. The comment letter argues for preserving this "holistic evaluation" process — the ability to assess cumulative impacts rather than isolated discharges.

Why this matters → The groups frame water protection as inseparable from where communities "live, play, work, gather food, and pray" — language that positions clean water not as an abstract environmental good but as the material basis for cultural and physical survival. It's a reminder that governance systems for ecological commons aren't technical abstractions but determine whether children can safely play in soil and elders can gather food from familiar places.

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Climate Justice Alliance
watergovernanceindigenous sovereigntyenvironmental justiceregulatory rollback

Warren, Merkley bill targets tax breaks for corporate landlords

Senate Democrats propose ending tax benefits for firms that own 450,000 single-family homes and 2.2 million apartments — treating housing as extractive asset class rather than commons. A test of whether governance can reclaim shelter from financialization.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley have introduced legislation to eliminate federal tax breaks for private equity and Wall Street firms buying residential property — a direct challenge to the financialization of housing that has transformed shelter into an extractive asset class. The American Homeownership Act targets firms that now own nearly 450,000 single-family homes and more than 2.2 million apartments, having purchased roughly one in six homes sold in 2025 while first-time homeownership hit historic lows.

The bill represents a governance intervention at the intersection of tax policy, housing commons, and democratic access to basic needs. By redirecting savings from closed tax loopholes toward housing construction and homeownership programs, it attempts to reframe housing policy around use value rather than speculative returns — a shift that echoes broader questions about how societies steward finite resources like land and shelter.

Why this matters → Whether the proposal gains traction may depend less on its policy merits than on whether it's understood as a governance design question: can democratic institutions reassert collective claims over essential infrastructure when financial markets have already restructured ownership at scale? The bill's bipartisan endorsement hints at shared recognition that housing precarity now operates as a legitimacy crisis for governance itself — one that requires not just subsidy adjustments but fundamental rethinking of who gets to own the ground beneath communities.

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Grounded Solutions Network
governancehousingdemocratic innovationcommonsfinancialization

Gaia Foundation Seeks Regional Coordinators for UK Seed Sovereignty Network

Two new coordinators will work across southern and western England to strengthen grassroots seed networks — governance infrastructure for food systems that roots sovereignty in regional practice and Indigenous knowledge.

The Gaia Foundation is hiring two part-time Seed Sovereignty Coordinators to nurture emerging grassroots networks across southern and western England. The roles — 21 hours per week, home-based — are designed for growers who want to split their time between soil and systems work, accompanying local communities in what Gaia calls "cultivating a food revolution that starts with seed."

The positions sit within a UK programme nearly a decade old, itself nested in Gaia's four-decade practice of supporting Indigenous and local communities to restore confidence in traditional seed knowledge and governance systems. The coordinators will connect regional developments to a broader network spanning northern England, Wales, Scotland, and international partnerships across Africa.

Why this matters → This is infrastructure work for distributed sovereignty — training programmes, multi-stakeholder partnerships, events that weave agroecological practice into governance capacity. The roles require understanding of seed production, agroecology, and collaboration skills to strengthen networks that operate as alternatives to consolidated seed systems. It's governance that must be felt and tested: hands in soil, eyes on the broader architecture of food resilience.

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Gaia Foundation
seed sovereigntyagroecologyindigenous knowledgefood systemsuk

Gen-Z protests erupt globally — but their political direction remains uncertain

Youth-led uprisings across 11+ countries share grievances about inequality and corruption, but don't point toward a clear democratic renewal. The question isn't whether young people can mobilize — it's whether existing governance systems can absorb their demands.

Youth-led uprisings swept through at least 11 countries in 2025, from Nepal to Madagascar to Peru, challenging regimes over inequality, corruption, and economic insecurity. Protesters shared symbols — skull and crossbones from the manga 'One Piece' — and messaging across borders, articulating unified demands for accountability. Yet governments responded with lethal force: 30,000 killed in Iran's ongoing crackdown, 700 in Tanzania during October elections, 76 in Nepal before the government fell. These violent responses suggest the protests are indeed threatening entrenched power — but what comes next remains ambiguous.

The uprisings stem from the same conditions fueling global populism: 68 percent of respondents in the 2025 IPSOS report feel economies are rigged for elites, and economic insecurity explains roughly one-third of recent populist surges. Gen-Z voters are simultaneously driving ultra-right gains in Europe while showing the strongest support for innovative governance experiments like a world parliament — 19 percentage points net support among 18-35 year-olds, versus just 0.5 for older cohorts. The contradiction reveals a generation unified in rejecting elite status quos but fractured about what should replace them.

Why this matters → The pattern suggests governance systems themselves — not just specific regimes — may be reaching a threshold. Young people worldwide are demonstrating a willingness to challenge power at grave personal cost, but the infrastructure for translating street politics into durable democratic renewal remains elusive. As Erica Chenoweth and Matthew Cebul note, protesters target corrupt elites specifically, yet their ambivalence toward democratic elections grows. The question isn't whether this generation can mobilize. It's whether existing political forms can evolve fast enough to channel their demands before they calcify into something else entirely.

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Democracy Without Borders
democratic innovationgovernanceyouth movementspopulisminstitutional design

Massachusetts defends inclusionary zoning as Fifth Amendment suits spread

A developer's constitutional challenge to Cambridge's affordable housing rules could reshape how 1,000+ U.S. inclusionary zoning policies function — testing whether local governance can require shared stewardship of urban space.

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell is intervening to defend Cambridge's inclusionary zoning policy against a lawsuit that could affect over 1,000 similar ordinances across 31 states. Developer Patrick Barrett challenges the city's requirement that 20 percent of residential floor space in larger developments be sold or rented below market rate — arguing it constitutes an unconstitutional taking under the Fifth Amendment. For his proposed $57 million condominium project on Columbia Street, that would mean units worth $15 million could sell for only $3.6 million.

The suit builds on the 2024 Supreme Court decision in Sheetz v. County of El Dorado, which opened legislative land-use rules to Fifth Amendment scrutiny. Barrett's attorneys at Pioneer New England Legal Foundation see "enormous precedential impact," potentially affecting not just Cambridge but Boston, Somerville, and hundreds of other jurisdictions that use inclusionary zoning to maintain economic diversity in their housing stock.

Why this matters → The case surfaces a fundamental governance tension: whether municipalities can mandate developers absorb costs for collective benefit, or whether property rights trump community-scale stewardship. Grounded Solutions Network's Doug Ryan argues the constitutional questions were settled decades ago — Virginia courts found inclusionary policies constitutional once paired with incentives like density bonuses. Cambridge's ordinance includes such structures. The question now is whether post-Sheetz jurisprudence will honor local experimentation in urban governance, or whether it will treat housing as purely private terrain beyond democratic reach.

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Grounded Solutions Network
governancedemocratic innovationurban planninglegal

Östersund tests governance through material reuse — and saves 10 million kronor

A Swedish municipality embeds circular economy into budget processes and public institutions, treating reuse not as a side project but as core governance infrastructure. The results: 250 tons of CO2 avoided, millions saved, and a model others can copy.

Östersund, a mid-sized Swedish municipality, opened Materialbanken in 2025 — a municipal depot that salvages materials from recycling centers and corporations, then redistributes them to schools and preschools. It's part of a broader shift the city calls "glo och sno" (look and steal): abandoning the pretense of inventing everything locally and instead copying what works, then scaling it.

The numbers suggest this isn't ceremonial. The city's internal furniture reuse unit — Inredningsavdelningen — circulated furniture worth 10.2 million kronor in 2025, avoiding 250 tons of CO2 by keeping materials in use. School meal climate footprints dropped from 1.95 to 1.36 kg CO2e per kilo in preschools through supplier dialogue and menu adjustments. All municipal cars but one now run fossil-free; construction sites electrified machinery in partnership with Volvo and Skanska. Östersund also introduced "waste charters" — bus tours to the municipal dump designed as public pedagogy, testing formats for civic engagement beyond the seminar room.

Why this matters → The model is explicitly designed for lateral transfer. Östersund adapted kitchen energy optimization from Uppsala and now shares its electrified construction playbook through Viable Cities and the Climate Leader Municipalities network. The municipality treats its governance experiments — from supplier dialogues to waste tourism — as public infrastructure others can fork and adapt. It's a reminder that transformative governance often looks less like grand declarations and more like iterative testing of procurement rules, budget templates, and lunch menus.

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Viable Cities
circular economymunicipal governanceclimatenordicdemocratic innovation

Fifth International Rights of Nature Tribunal convenes with expanded mandate

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature has convened its fifth tribunal, this time with an expanded mandate covering ocean governance and AI-mediated environmental harm — territory that bridges Garden and Spaceship orientations.

The tribunal, which operates as a form of governance performance — part legal proceeding, part public ritual — heard cases involving deep-sea mining in the Pacific, algorithmic water allocation in the Colorado Basin, and satellite-detected deforestation in the Congo.

What makes these tribunals significant for The Garden's research is their hybrid nature. They are simultaneously symbolic and substantive: not legally binding, yet increasingly cited by courts and policymakers. They demonstrate that governance rituals can shape institutional reality even without formal authority.

Why this matters → Several tribunal participants have connections to Nordic institutions, including collaborators at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

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Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature
rights of naturegovernancetribunal

EURIP opens applications for interdisciplinary research on planetary challenges

Learning Planet Institute's Graduate School in Paris seeks students willing to cross disciplinary boundaries to address systemic challenges — a model that tests whether academic structures can adapt to planetary-scale problems.

The École Universitaire de Recherche Interdisciplinaire de Paris (EURIP) has opened applications for its 2026 cohort, explicitly targeting students interested in working across disciplines on what it calls "the grand challenges facing our world." Hosted by the Learning Planet Institute, the graduate program positions itself as training ground for researchers who won't stay within traditional academic silos.

The framing matters. EURIP structures itself around problem-driven inquiry rather than departmental logic — the kind of institutional redesign that governance innovation requires but universities rarely attempt. Whether the model produces researchers capable of addressing interconnected crises, or simply adds interdisciplinary credentials to conventional career paths, remains an open question.

Why this matters → The application window represents a modest but concrete test: can educational institutions be reconfigured to match the complexity of the systems they study? Paris becomes one more site where that experiment unfolds, joining similar efforts from Arizona State's College of Global Futures to Utrecht's Copernicus Institute. The challenge isn't recruitment — it's whether graduates find pathways that reward boundary-crossing work.

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Learning Planet Institute
educationinterdisciplinarylearning planetparisresearch

Forests as rain-makers: governance beyond biodiversity

New satellite research reveals that 40% of corn and 60% of wheat depend on land-based rainfall — unstable moisture from forests, wetlands, and soil that agricultural expansion is actively destroying.

A sixteen-year satellite study has revealed an uncomfortable feedback loop: the agricultural expansion that clears forests and degrades soil is undermining the very rainfall that agriculture depends on. Researchers analyzing precipitation data from 2003 to 2019 found that crops relying heavily on land-based rainfall — moisture from forests, wetlands, and soil rather than ocean evaporation — face significantly higher drought risk and yield variability.

The threshold is precise: when land-based rainfall exceeds 36% of total precipitation, crop performance deteriorates measurably. This affects vast agricultural regions, including the U.S. Midwest and parts of East Africa. Globally, 40% of corn and 60% of wheat now depend primarily on terrestrial evaporation for their water — a source made increasingly volatile as forests fall and soil erodes to make room for more fields.

Why this matters → As the researchers conclude: protecting these ecosystems isn't just about biodiversity, it's about sustaining agriculture itself. The question is whether governance systems can respond to evidence about invisible atmospheric flows as readily as they do to visible field boundaries.

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Future Earth
ecological stewardshipplanetary governancehydrological systemsagricultureresearch

Paul Hawken on Curiosity, Soil, and Fire-Triggered Succession

The author of Regeneration and founder of Project Drawdown reflects on what regenerative agriculture actually means — not as branding exercise, but as practice that must be felt, verified, and embodied through direct relationship with land and living systems.

Paul Hawken's early work founding Erewhon came from a visceral moment: discovering he'd unknowingly lied to a customer about organic oats. His response wasn't to find better labels — it was to visit every farm himself, walk the land, speak with the people growing food. It's a telling origin story for someone who would go on to map climate solutions at planetary scale through Project Drawdown, then write *Regeneration* and *Carbon: The Book of Life*. The through-line is the same: systems must be known through direct encounter, not abstraction.

In this interview with Kiss the Ground, Hawken offers a useful frame for the current moment. "Where we are right now is where fire and the fire-triggered succession are happening at the same time," he says, describing both ecological and social breakdown alongside the emergence of regenerative movements worldwide. It's not optimism — it's observation of what seeds lie dormant, what heat triggers succession, what new growth appears in ash.

Why this matters → Hawken notes that "regenerative agriculture" will be misused by large companies "for a while." The counterweight is organizations that tell the truth — not through critique alone, but by making visible what's already growing. Ten years from now, he suggests, the question won't be whether regenerative agriculture exists, but whether we can see it clearly enough to distinguish practice from performance.

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Kiss the Ground
regenerative agricultureecological stewardshiptransformative practicesoilclimate

The perverse arithmetic of coral reef recovery

Coral reefs could sustainably yield 9,000 additional meals per square kilometer — but only if communities dependent on fishing accept decades of reduced catch. A stark example of governance as temporal negotiation.

Coral reef fisheries could produce enough fish to feed millions in malnourished regions, according to research published in PNAS that modeled 2,000 reef sites worldwide. The arithmetic is stark: properly managed reefs could yield 9,000 additional meals per square kilometer. In Indonesia alone, 1.4 million people could meet recommended fish consumption levels. In the Philippines, 800,000. In Tanzania, over 500,000.

But the path from potential to reality reveals governance as a temporal dilemma that must be felt, not merely calculated. To reach sustainable yields, overfished reefs — where biomass now averages 32% below what could exist at maximum sustainable harvest — need 6 to 70 years of reduced fishing pressure. In Kenya, Mauritius, and Oman, some reefs retain less than 10% of their baseline biomass. "To reduce fishing pressure for more fish protein in the long term, we need ways to make up for nutritional shortfalls in the short term," notes ecologist Sean Connolly of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. "That's the biggest challenge."

Why this matters → This is governance as negotiation between generations, between immediate need and future capacity — precisely the kind of temporal distribution that formal institutions struggle to enact but communities must somehow navigate. The 9,000 meals per square kilometer are real. So is the hunger between now and then.

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Future Earth
ecological stewardshipgovernanceoceanfood systemsclimate

What makes a rewilding image worth seeing — and judging

As the Rewilding Europe Award deadline approaches, photographer Jon A. Juárez reflects on what makes rewilding imagery matter: not just aesthetics, but the governance relationships between people, science, and returning ecosystems.

Jon A. Juárez won last year's Rewilding Europe Award with an image of an Atlantic sturgeon being released into Sweden's Göta River — a single frame that distilled days of coordinated transport, tagging, acclimatisation, and scientific commitment. Now serving as a judge for this year's award, the Berlin-based photographer and biologist emphasizes that rewilding photography should capture more than charismatic wildlife. It should reveal the relationships that make restoration possible: the scientists building release cages, the communities negotiating coexistence, the governance structures that allow long-extinct species to return.

Juárez's work spans underwater, aerial, and terrestrial perspectives — an adaptability he once saw as a weakness in a field dominated by specialists. He's come to understand it as essential to his practice: different angles reveal different layers of the story, and conservation narratives require responsiveness to what the moment demands. His ongoing collaboration with the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research has shown him that compelling imagery doesn't just translate science for public audiences — it functions as infrastructure within research itself, strengthening grant applications and policy discussions.

Why this matters → This is governance at ecological scale: not policy documents but the coordinated effort to build a cage in a river, time a release with scientific precision, and document the moment when commitment becomes return. Photography here functions as both witness and infrastructure — making the invisible labor of restoration legible, and the abstract promise of recovery concrete.

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Rewilding Europe
rewildingeuropeecological stewardshipphotographyspecies restoration

Digital Twins of Earth: Testing Governance Before the Crisis Arrives

ESA's Digital Twin Earth program creates real-time planetary simulations — not just to model floods or fire, but to stress-test governance responses before disaster strikes. It's scenario planning made operational, fed by satellite data and constrained by physics.

Researchers gathered at the European Space Agency in early February to advance what might be the most consequential development in planetary governance infrastructure: real-time digital replicas of Earth's interacting systems. Unlike static models, these "digital twins" continuously ingest satellite observations — terabytes daily — to simulate floods in Italy, agricultural stress across continents, and carbon dynamics in managed forests. The key innovation isn't just predictive accuracy; it's the integration of human activity, economics, and policy into the simulations themselves.

Freya Muir, research coordinator for Future Earth and ESA, calls it "weather forecasting, but for air pollution events in cities, coastal erosion from incoming storms, glacial floods in remote mountain settlements." The ESA's DTE Hydrology component demonstrated what-if scenarios for flood risk across Italy based on cumulative precipitation — precisely the kind of tool that makes governance testable rather than theoretical. If you can simulate how a policy intervention affects water security or disaster response, you can iterate before lives are at stake.

Why this matters → The ESA workshop showcased projects like EOAgriTwin and Forest DTC, each modeling a slice of planetary function with the eventual aim of interconnection — where simulated ocean warming feeds into ice sheet melt projections, where agricultural stress cascades into migration models. It's governance infrastructure disguised as Earth science: a way to feel the consequences of policy choices in advance, to test resilience before the storm.

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Future Earth
governance techclimateearth observationsimulationeuropean space

Pastoralists as Land Stewards: Mobility, Tenure, and Rangeland Governance

A coalition webinar ahead of UNCCD COP17 reframes pastoralism as regenerative governance — not degradation driver. The challenge: translating centuries of mobile land stewardship into policy that recognizes rights to territory and movement, not just plots.

On 11 February, the Agroecology Coalition and International Land Coalition convened grassroots leaders and officials to examine pastoralist systems as climate adaptation infrastructure. The session — timed to precede UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar this August — centered on a governance puzzle: how to secure land rights for people whose relationship to land is defined by movement, not fixed boundaries.

The evidence presented was consistent across geographies. Najim Ataka of Réseau Billital Maroobè described West African pastoralism as centuries-old agroecological practice that prevents degradation through seasonal mobility, fertilizes soils through managed grazing, and maintains biodiversity in drylands routinely dismissed as unproductive. Khalid Khawaledh of WAMIP noted that pastoral systems become fragile not from overuse but from constraint — when mobility routes are restricted or tenure insecure, the regenerative cycle breaks. Degradation follows the loss of governance, not the presence of herds.

Why this matters → COP17 offers a test case: whether global land governance can accommodate systems that don't conform to cadastral logic. Tunisia plans to restore 200,000 hectares using agroecological methods; Burkina Faso frames secure pastoral tenure as prerequisite for climate justice. The question isn't whether pastoralism works — the ecological record is clear — but whether governance institutions can recognize stewardship practices that operate across boundaries rather than within them.

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Agroecology Coalition
land rightsagroecologyindigenous governanceclimateunccd

Three reports link extreme wealth concentration to democratic erosion

New assessments from Oxfam, a G20 expert committee, and the World Inequality Lab find billionaire wealth has grown 81% since 2020 while democratic institutions weaken — evidence that governance systems cannot be separated from economic architecture.

Billionaire wealth reached $18.3 trillion in 2025, an 81% increase in real terms since 2020, according to Oxfam's latest assessment. The concentration is accelerating: fortunes at the top grew 16.2% in the past year alone, three times faster than the average rate since 2020. Meanwhile, 2.6 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, and food insecurity has risen by 335 million people since 2019.

The governance implications are direct. An expert committee convened by South Africa's G20 presidency found that countries with high inequality — defined as a Gini coefficient above 0.4, now encompassing 83% of nations and 90% of the global population — are significantly more likely to experience democratic decline. Oxfam's research shows more unequal countries face up to seven times greater risk of democratic erosion. The committee warned that wealth concentration translates into political inequality through media ownership and campaign finance, eroding institutional trust and fueling polarization.

Why this matters → The convergence of these reports — from Oxfam, the G20 committee, and the World Inequality Lab — represents a diagnostic consensus: governance systems cannot function democratically when wealth is this concentrated. The question is whether institutions can respond to what the G20 committee called an "emergency" with the same urgency they've brought to other planetary-scale challenges.

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Democracy Without Borders
governancedemocracyinequalityinstitutions

Housing Network Expands Capacity Through Nonprofit Learning Partnership

Grounded Solutions Network sponsors Nonprofit Quarterly's Leading Edge program, connecting community land trusts and housing justice organizations with management training amid federal funding pressures — infrastructure for the infrastructure.

Grounded Solutions Network has become a 2026 Community-Level Sponsor of Nonprofit Quarterly's Leading Edge program, extending access to over 50 expert-led webinars and management resources to its strategic partners and Champion-level members. The partnership arrives as nonprofits nationwide face what both organizations describe as significant federal funding cuts and mounting organizational pressures.

The move reflects a particular kind of governance challenge — how organizations advancing structural alternatives like community land trusts sustain themselves when traditional funding contracts. Grounded Solutions, which emerged from a 2016 merger of the National Community Land Trust Network and Cornerstone Partnership, focuses on housing models designed to remain affordable across generations, a temporal approach to stewardship that requires institutional resilience to match.

Why this matters → The structure matters here: strategic partners and Champion-level members receive full access, while standard organizational members are encouraged to upgrade. It's a tiered model of resource distribution within a network dedicated to housing equity — itself a small test of how values translate into organizational design.

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Grounded Solutions Network
housingcapacity buildingnonprofit governanceequitycommunity land trusts

Housing Network Joins NPQ to Strengthen Nonprofit Governance Infrastructure

Grounded Solutions Network partners with Nonprofit Quarterly to give housing justice organizations access to governance training and peer networks — recognizing that transformative systems work requires strengthened organizational capacity.

Grounded Solutions Network has become a 2026 Community-Level Sponsor of Nonprofit Quarterly's Leading Edge program, securing access to governance training and strategic tools for housing justice organizations across its network. The partnership provides Champion-level members with year-round access to 50+ expert-led webinars, equity-driven management frameworks, and peer connection infrastructure — resources aimed at building organizational capacity during a period of federal funding contraction.

The timing matters. Nonprofits working at the intersection of housing and community development face mounting pressure as federal program budgets shrink. NPQ reaches more than 800,000 monthly readers and has spent nearly three decades advancing conversations on democratic practice, racial justice, and movement leadership. This isn't abstract capacity-building — it's infrastructure for the organizations doing ground-level governance work in communities.

Why this matters → The partnership reflects a recognition that transformative practice requires more than good ideas. It requires functional organizations with competent leadership, sustainable funding models, and connection to broader networks of practice. Governance systems, whether at the organizational or community level, must be actively maintained and continuously learned — not just theorized about from a distance.

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Grounded Solutions Network
governancedemocratic innovationhousingnonprofitcapacity building

Lake Kartal: wetland governance tested at war's edge

In Ukraine's Danube Delta, six years of restoration has reconnected 18,000 hectares of floodplain to the river — a reminder that ecological governance means reshaping flows, not just protecting boundaries, even under the strain of invasion.

In the Ukrainian part of the Danube Delta, the Rewilding Ukraine team has spent six years removing dams, clearing channels, and installing sluice pipes to reconnect Lake Kartal with the Danube. The result: 18,000 hectares of wetland now exchange water freely with the river, reversing decades of drainage infrastructure that choked off the floodplain. The final phase — reopening five kilometers of the Luzarza channel — has increased water flow by 40%, bringing the system closer to its natural hydrology and revitalizing 450 hectares of habitat.

This is wetland governance as physical practice: not policy documents but excavators and water levels, tested against the comeback of fish stocks and nesting birds. "When ecosystems here receive enough water — and when that water is clean — nature has an extraordinary ability to heal itself," notes Oleg Dyakov, rewilding officer with the project. Panas Zhechkov of the Izmail Department of Water Resources, a long-term collaborator, points to tangible returns: rising water quality, richer fish populations, renewed irrigation capacity for farmers.

Why this matters → The work has proceeded through Russia's invasion — a governance stress test of another kind. Where war has disrupted livelihoods and stalled nature-based tourism, Lake Kartal offers a counter-narrative: healthier wetlands as infrastructure for post-conflict recovery, supporting fishermen and building resilience while the larger question of Ukraine's future remains unresolved. Wetlands cover 6% of Earth's land surface but support 40% of terrestrial species — Europe has lost half of them in three centuries. Lake Kartal's rapid recovery suggests that restoration, when grounded in hydrological realities rather than preservation rhetoric, can move faster than we expect.

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Rewilding Europe
ecological stewardshiprestorationukrainewetlandstransformative practice

François Taddei on Building a Learning Planet

The Learning Planet Institute's co-founder joins a podcast exploring educational models as governance infrastructure — treating learning not as preparation for citizenship but as citizenship itself.

François Taddei, co-founder and president of the Learning Planet Institute, appeared on the eighth episode of Courant Alternatif, a French podcast exploring alternative currents in education and society. The conversation centered on a deceptively simple provocation: what if everyone were a researcher?

Taddei's framing — building a "learning planet" through alternative educational models — positions pedagogy as a form of governance practice. This echoes The Garden's thesis that governance systems must be felt and tested: education isn't just preparation for democratic participation, it is democratic participation. The question isn't whether citizens can learn to govern, but whether governance structures can learn from citizens.

Why this matters → The podcast description hints at a familiar tension: imagining "a world where one person's dream doesn't become another's nightmare." It's a governance question disguised as an educational one, pointing to the design challenge at the heart of planetary coordination — how to build systems that distribute agency rather than concentrate it.

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Learning Planet Institute
educationdemocratic innovationlearninggovernance

IPBES Report Maps the $7 Trillion Gap Between Economic Growth and Ecological Reality

The first fast-track business-biodiversity assessment reveals a stark asymmetry: $7.3 trillion in nature-harming flows versus $220 billion for restoration — a gap that threatens economic stability and requires governance innovation at the intersection of markets and ecosystems.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services convened 150 member governments in Manchester this month to approve its first fast-track assessment — a three-year effort by 79 experts examining how business activity intersects with planetary boundaries. The numbers are clarifying: in 2023, public and private financial flows harming nature reached $7.3 trillion, while biodiversity conservation and restoration received just $220 billion. The ratio itself is a governance artifact, revealing how current economic architecture remains structurally misaligned with ecological reality.

Developed with input from Indigenous communities, scientists, and private sector actors, the report positions businesses not as peripheral actors but as central to whether the Global Biodiversity Framework's targets can be met. Dr. David Obura, IPBES Chair and Earth Commission member, framed the assessment as addressing Target 15 of the Framework while acknowledging that "businesses are at the center of how our economies, and large parts of our society, depend on and impact nature." The language is careful — dependencies and impacts, not externalities. It's a subtle shift that reframes ecological damage as systemic risk rather than side effect.

Why this matters → The report's urgency stems partly from its methodology: a fast-track process designed to deliver actionable intelligence midway through the critical decade for climate and biodiversity goals. What remains to be tested is whether information alone — however comprehensive — can catalyze the governance transformations needed to redirect those trillions. The assessment offers a map; the question is whether existing institutions can navigate by it, or whether new forms of economic governance will need to be built and tested in practice.

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Future Earth
biodiversitygovernanceeconomic systemsplanetary boundariesipbes

What makes a rewilding image powerful? A photographer's lens on conservation storytelling

As Europe's wildlife photography competition opens submissions, judge Viktoria Pezzei argues for images that show human hands in ecological work — not pristine wilderness, but the lived practice of restoration.

The Rewilding Europe Award, part of the European Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, closes for submissions on March 1. This year's judge, Munich-based photographer Viktoria Pezzei, is looking for something specific: images that "dive below the surface and truly tell a story." Not just technical mastery or charismatic megafauna, but photographs that reveal the tangible, often invisible work of ecological restoration — including the humans doing it.

Pezzei's own practice centers on what she calls conservation's "underdogs": bats in Bavaria, fawn rescue during haying season, researchers setting mist nets at dusk. Her work deliberately includes people and equipment, rejecting nature photography's traditional sanitization. "Conservation is inherently a human story," she says. "In today's world, many of our most vulnerable species simply wouldn't survive without human intervention." It's a framing that aligns with The Garden's thesis: that governance — ecological or otherwise — must be embodied, tested, and made visible, not abstracted into policy documents or pristine imagery.

Why this matters → Pezzei is currently a Vital Impacts Fellow working on a project about bats in agriculture — another underrepresented story about the material relationships that sustain human systems. Her emphasis on local, accessible narratives suggests a different model for conservation communication: not spectacle, but the patient documentation of restoration as it unfolds, hands and all.

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Rewilding Europe
ecological stewardshipstorytellingrestorationdemocratic innovationembodied practice

Coexistence guidance equips European mayors to govern alongside returning wildlife

A new toolkit launched by Rewilding Europe offers municipal leaders practical frameworks for human-wildlife coexistence — recognizing local governance as the crucial layer where ecological recovery becomes lived experience.

As wolves, bears, beavers, and bison return to European landscapes, the question isn't whether people can live with wildlife — it's how governance structures enable that coexistence. A new guide launched by Rewilding Europe and the Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme treats this as a governance challenge, not merely an ecological one. "Living well with wildlife: A practical guide" provides mayors and municipal authorities with concrete tools to co-design local strategies, mediate conflict, and shift communities from tolerance to what the authors call "shared prosperity."

The guidance arrived at a moment of institutional readiness — countries across Europe are drafting National Nature Restoration Plans, creating openings for local leadership to shape implementation. More than 680 participants from 70 countries joined the launch webinar, including municipal representatives, farmers, and policymakers. The turnout signals recognition that rewilding is fundamentally about governance at the community scale: who decides how land is used, whose knowledge counts, and how benefits and burdens are distributed when ecosystems change.

Why this matters → This is governance infrastructure for ecological change — practical, localized, and designed to be tested in the field. Whether it works depends less on the guide itself than on the municipal capacity, political will, and social cohesion it assumes. But as a framework for making nature recovery governable at the human scale, it reflects a growing understanding that rewilding isn't something done to communities, but through them.

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Rewilding Europe
rewildinggovernancecoexistencemunicipal leadershipecological stewardship

EPA Revokes Endangerment Finding as Justice Networks Mobilize Resistance

The Trump EPA's revocation of the 2009 Endangerment Finding — the scientific basis for climate regulation — triggers coordinated resistance from environmental justice networks representing millions of frontline communities.

The EPA announced its final decision to revoke the 2009 Endangerment Finding and vehicle emissions standards, eliminating the scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health. The decision came despite written comments from a coalition of five environmental justice networks — representing millions of frontline communities — signed by 100 organizations and backed by testimonies documenting the lived reality of transportation and climate pollution.

The coalition includes the Climate Justice Alliance, Moving Forward Network, Platform for a Just Climate, Environmental Justice Health Alliance, and Environmental Justice Leadership Forum. Their September comments argued the revocation violates EPA's foundational mission, relies on flawed science, ignores impacts on workers, and prioritizes corporate polluters over communities already bearing disproportionate pollution burdens. "We refuse to accept a future where our communities are turned into sacrifice zones so corporate polluters can profit," said Byron Gudiel of the Center for Earth Energy & Democracy.

Why this matters → The confrontation raises a question central to governance under pressure: what mechanisms remain when regulatory agencies abandon their mandates? These networks aren't appealing to the EPA's better nature — they're building coordinated resistance infrastructure across communities that have always known environmental protection as something fought for, not granted. The answer to institutional abandonment, they suggest, lies in the organizing capacity that created the EPA 55 years ago, not in the agency itself.

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Climate Justice Alliance
climategovernanceenvironmental justiceregulationresistance

Habitat Seattle doubles down on community land trusts and debt remediation

A Habitat affiliate in Washington state has pioneered a debt remediation program while scaling community land trust homeownership — testing new mechanisms for equitable access to housing that lasts generations.

Habitat for Humanity Seattle-King & Kittitas Counties has quietly become a laboratory for housing governance innovation. The affiliate operates a community land trust model ensuring permanent affordability across ownership cycles, but its real breakthrough came in 2023 with the country's first debt remediation program — paying off enough of applicants' existing debt to make them mortgage-ready for loans up to $50,000. Local banks now fund the program independently, and other community development financial institutions have replicated the model across Washington.

Colleen Clayton, the organization's Associate Director of Homeowner Services, describes the work as both systems redesign and relationship building. Her team has been overhauling processes end-to-end — from first contact through closing — to double annual production goals while maintaining equity and consistency. It's the kind of operational scaling that governance systems rarely attempt without sacrificing the human elements that make them work.

Why this matters → These aren't policy proposals or advocacy campaigns — they're implemented systems being tested and refined in real time. The community land trust structure ensures affordability persists beyond individual transactions; the debt program removes barriers that income guidelines alone can't address; the rental experiments probe whether preservation and accessibility can coexist. Governance, in other words, as something built and lived rather than merely designed.

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Grounded Solutions Network
housingcommunity land trustsdemocratic innovationequityurban governance

Youth governance at the UN: from symbolic participation to structural influence

Student delegates at a UN Youth Office dialogue explore what meaningful participation looks like — not merely consultation, but structural influence in institutional decision-making. The event tested frameworks for youth engagement as governance practice.

The United Nations Youth Office and Learning Planet Institute convened a hybrid dialogue in February 2026 titled "UN Youth Compass: Making Meaningful Youth Engagement the Norm," funded by the European Union. Student participants reflected on what distinguished this gathering from typical youth consultations — a recurring question in global governance structures that often invite young voices without ceding decision-making power.

The dialogue centered on translating commitments into influence, a shift from symbolic inclusion to structural participation. This mirrors broader challenges in democratic innovation: how do institutions move beyond performative engagement to genuinely distributed authority? The Youth Compass framework attempts to codify practices that make youth participation substantive rather than decorative — a governance design question as much as a policy one.

Why this matters → The Learning Planet Institute's involvement signals ongoing experimentation with governance formats that treat participation as embodied practice rather than abstract principle. Whether such frameworks can reshape institutional cultures at UN scale remains an open question, but the students' reflections suggest the distinction between meaningful and token engagement is increasingly legible to participants themselves — perhaps the first condition for demanding more.

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Learning Planet Institute
governancedemocratic innovationyouthunited nationsinstitutional design

Youth governance at the UN: from symbolic presence to structural voice

The UN Youth Compass dialogue tested whether intergenerational governance can move beyond consultation theater. Student participants assessed what meaningful engagement actually requires — not just seats at tables, but power to reshape them.

The United Nations Youth Office and Learning Planet Institute convened a hybrid dialogue in February 2026 to stress-test a proposition: that youth participation in global governance could become structural rather than performative. The "UN Youth Compass: Making Meaningful Youth Engagement the Norm" brought together student participants to examine the gap between symbolic inclusion and genuine influence.

The session operated as both policy forum and institutional experiment — a chance to observe what meaningful engagement demands in practice. Participants assessed not whether young people should be heard, but what governance architectures make that hearing consequential. The question isn't representation but transformation: whether decision-making bodies can absorb perspectives that challenge their temporal horizons and institutional reflexes.

Why this matters → The hybrid format itself is instructive. Remote participation isn't just accommodation; it's recognition that planetary governance happens across distributed networks, not only in conference centers. How institutions design for genuine participation across digital and physical space — who gets to set agendas, who mediates discussion, whose time is valued — reveals what they believe governance actually is.

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Learning Planet Institute
governanceunyouthdemocratic innovationintergenerational

Sweden expands city climate coalition beyond pilot group

Viable Cities opens new call to expand beyond its 48-city Climate Neutral Cities 2030 initiative. The expansion tests whether collaborative governance models can scale — a recurring question in transition practice.

Viable Cities, Sweden's network for urban climate transition, has opened a new funding call to expand beyond its current cohort of 48 cities working toward climate neutrality by 2030. The expansion tests a familiar tension in governance innovation: whether collaborative models developed with early adopters can maintain their transformative potential at scale.

Program director Olga Kordas frames the expansion around collective capacity — "the power of many" — suggesting the network sees value not just in replicating tools but in expanding the community of practice itself. This reflects a broader shift in climate governance from showcase projects to systemic change attempts, where the social infrastructure of transition matters as much as the technical roadmaps.

Why this matters → The call represents what might be called governance through accretion: building change capacity by inviting more municipalities into an established practice space rather than designing new programs from scratch. Whether this approach can preserve the depth of engagement that smaller networks afford — or whether it becomes diluted coordination — remains an open question. Sweden's municipal structure, with significant local autonomy and relatively strong civic capacity, provides particular conditions for this experiment.

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Viable Cities
climategovernancenordicurbandemocratic innovation

The Work of Re-membering: Communities Attune to the Rhythms of Land

From Kenyan clans reviving biocultural knowledge to Antarctic rights advocacy, communities worldwide are rekindling what Thomas Berry called the 'Great Conversation' — governance as relationship, not extraction.

What does it mean to govern as if the Earth were speaking? The Gaia Foundation's latest Earth Jurisprudence update documents communities learning to listen — not metaphorically, but with the precision of fine instruments tuning to frequencies beyond human speech.

In Tharaka, Kenya, clans are mapping their territory by moon cycles and constellation patterns, charting not ownership but belonging. The work, captured in a new film by Andy Pilsbury, follows generations reweaving themselves into ecosystems through song, seasonal calendars, and the ecological indicators that once guided planting and ritual. In Zimbabwe's Chirorwe and Mutsinzwa communities, similar mapping processes are reviving pre-colonial memories of attunement — governance systems felt in the body, tested against weather patterns and forest rhythms. This is governance as Thomas Berry conceived it: participation in an ongoing conversation with mountains, rivers, and the wheeling stars.

Why this matters → The through-line isn't novelty but memory. As Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak reminds in conversation with Gaia's Liz Hosken: this work demands 'affectionate alliances' built over decades, not projects but relationships. The question isn't whether to bring nature into decision-making, but how to embed ourselves back into systems we never truly left — governance not as dominance, but as the patient work of re-membering.

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Gaia Foundation
rights of natureearth jurisprudenceindigenous governanceecological stewardshiplegal innovation

Normandy's PRELE initiative joins European rewilding network

A regional French programme letting forests and wetlands recover without human interference joins a network of 105 rewilding initiatives — advancing a governance model where ecosystems manage themselves.

The Programme Régional pour les Espaces en Libre Évolution (PRELE) has become the newest member of Rewilding Europe's European Rewilding Network, bringing France's first regional libre évolution initiative into a coalition of 105 rewilding projects across 29 countries. Based in Normandy, PRELE operates on a simple premise: give nature the authority to manage itself. By removing dams, fences, and active management from forests, wetlands, and fallow farmland, the programme creates space for ecosystems to evolve on their own terms.

This is governance by withdrawal — a deliberate relinquishing of control that inverts conventional conservation management. Led by the Conservatoire d'Espaces Naturels de Normandie, PRELE works with private landowners and local authorities to establish sites where human intervention is minimized or eliminated entirely. Unlike many rewilding networks in France, it extends beyond forests to include wetlands and agricultural land, positioning Normandy at the forefront of a broader movement reshaping how French landscapes are governed.

Why this matters → Education sits at the heart of PRELE's work. Through workshops and school programmes, the initiative fosters what it calls a "deeper, more lasting connection with the wild" — suggesting that governance transformation requires not just policy change, but a shift in how communities perceive their relationship to non-human systems. As climate and biodiversity pressures intensify, the French rewilding movement offers a testable proposition: that some territories are best governed by letting them govern themselves.

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Rewilding Europe
rewildingfranceecological governancelibre evolutionrights of nature

Hope as Educational Infrastructure

François Taddei frames hope not as sentiment but as educational architecture — a necessary foundation for governance systems that must adapt to planetary-scale challenges while remaining rooted in human capacity for learning.

The Learning Planet Institute's latest podcast episode features co-founder François Taddei making a deceptively simple claim: hope is education's greatest asset. But this isn't motivational rhetoric — Taddei is arguing for hope as infrastructure, as the substrate that allows learning systems to function under conditions of radical uncertainty.

The timing matters. As governance systems face challenges that exceed the capacity of existing institutional knowledge — climate adaptation, technological disruption, ecological collapse — the ability to maintain orientation while learning becomes itself a form of institutional design. Taddei's framing suggests that educational systems, like governance systems, must be built to sustain inquiry even when answers remain distant.

Why this matters → This connects to a broader recognition emerging across democratic innovation work: that the emotional and psychological dimensions of institutional life aren't peripheral concerns but foundational ones. Systems that can't sustain hope — understood here as the capacity to continue learning and adapting — become brittle exactly when flexibility matters most. The question isn't whether to feel hopeful, but how to build structures that make sustained engagement possible.

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Learning Planet Institute
educationtransformative practicedemocratic innovationlearning

Philadelphia neighborhood tests perpetual trust as anti-displacement tool

The Kensington Corridor Trust removes 30+ properties from speculative markets through a perpetual purpose trust governed by 32,000 local residents — testing whether collective ownership can anchor neighborhoods against displacement.

In Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood — an area long marked by disinvestment and some of the city's worst health and education outcomes — more than 30 properties now operate under a different logic. The Kensington Corridor Trust holds storefronts, a community garden, and soon a solar-powered grocery store under a perpetual purpose trust structure, governed ultimately by the roughly 32,000 residents of the 19134 zip code. The properties have been removed from speculative markets to ensure long-term affordability and collective control.

"We got here because policies failed this neighborhood on purpose," says Adriana Abizadeh-Barbour, the trust's executive director. "We're designing our way out. We're designing our way past redlining and insurance hikes and intentional speculation and crime." The trust is now launching a community stewardship trust that allows residents to buy property shares for as little as $10 a month and receive dividends — an attempt to distribute not just governance power but also wealth accumulation.

Why this matters → What makes Kensington notable is the governance mechanism itself: a perpetual trust accountable to a defined residential base, managing real assets at neighborhood scale. It's governance you can visit — a diner, a hair-braiding shop, a photography studio — each one a small test of whether alternative ownership structures can hold against market pressure over time.

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Grounded Solutions Network
democratic innovationgovernanceurbancommonseconomic justice

Agroecology versus Regenerative Agriculture: A Question of Power

Belgian-Welsh farmer Ann Owen argues that regenerative agriculture serves corporate interests while agroecology builds practitioner power. The distinction matters: one treats farming as optimization, the other as transformative practice rooted in social and ecological balance.

During Regenerating Europe Week 2026 — which brought events to the European Parliament and farm visits near Brussels — Agroecology Europe spoke with Ann Owen, a Belgian-born agroecological farmer now working in Wales. Her diagnosis of the regenerative agriculture movement is unsparing: "Comparing agroecology and regenerative is like comparing apples with tomatoes, they're just completely different things."

The distinction, for Owen, turns on power and practice. Regenerative agriculture, she argues, serves agrochemical interests eager to sell pest management products and machinery to replace labor. Agroecology, by contrast, "empowers the practitioners" through peer learning rather than top-down certification, treating farming as worthwhile work that keeps people on the land with decent incomes. Where regenerative farmers might replace ploughing with glyphosate and call it progress, agroecologists build ecological balance that keeps pests and predators in equilibrium. "There's a reason why agroecology is a peasant movement," Owen notes.

Why this matters → Owen's prescription for advancing agroecology echoes The Garden's own thesis: "It needs stories, and it needs good news stories." People are receptive to what has changed for the better, she argues, invoking Rob Hopkins on the power of imagination. "If we can imagine a change then we are on the way to achieving it. As agroecologists our opponent in transforming the way we eat and farm is public despair, and our greatest asset is public hope." Governance, in other words, begins in the greenhouse.

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Agroecology Europe
agroecologyfood systemsdemocratic innovationecological stewardshiptransformative practice

UNESCO launches climate learning experience linking purpose discovery to collective action

MOOD — Meaningful Open Opportunities for Discovery — brings 100+ participants into a UN-certified learning experience that frames climate action as both personal exploration and governance practice, testing how structured discovery might scale.

The UNESCO Global Skills Academy has backed the launch of MOOD (Meaningful Open Opportunities for Discovery), a UN-certified learning experience that treats climate action as inseparable from purpose discovery and collective organizing. An initial online workshop drew over 100 participants into what the program describes as structured experimentation — not just skill-building, but a deliberate practice of connecting individual agency to planetary-scale challenges.

The model is worth watching. MOOD attempts to bridge a persistent gap in climate governance: the space between individual concern and coordinated action. By certifying the experience through UN channels while maintaining an open, workshop-based format, it signals an institutional willingness to test learning architectures that don't rely solely on credentialing or expertise transfer. Whether this scales beyond early adopters — and whether 'purpose discovery' translates into durable practice — remains an open question.

Why this matters → The program arrives as educational institutions worldwide grapple with how to prepare people not just for climate impacts, but for participation in the governance innovations those impacts will demand. If MOOD can demonstrate that structured reflection and peer learning produce not just awareness but capability, it may offer a template for the kind of distributed capacity-building planetary stewardship will require.

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Learning Planet Institute
climatelearningunescocollective actioncapacity building

Two risk reports map a fracturing governance landscape

The Global Challenges Foundation and World Economic Forum release assessments showing seven of nine planetary boundaries breached, rising geoeconomic confrontation, and institutional erosion — all pointing to what GCF calls the need for governance that recognizes 'planetary commons cannot be negotiated with.'

Two major risk assessments released this month — one from the Global Challenges Foundation, the other from the World Economic Forum — sketch a world where governance systems lag dangerously behind the crises they're meant to address. The GCF report is blunt: seven of nine planetary boundaries have now been breached, most recently ocean acidification, while "our collective capacity to mitigate global catastrophic risks... remains weak at best." It identifies five existential threats — climate change, biodiversity collapse, weapons of mass destruction, AI in military decision-making, and asteroid impact — and calls for legally binding frameworks on autonomous weapons and what it terms "institutional creativity," citing mechanisms of citizen participation as essential.

The WEF assessment, drawing on surveys of over 1,300 experts, centers on uncertainty itself. Half of respondents foresee a "turbulent or stormy" outlook over the next two years, rising to 57% over the next decade. Geoeconomic confrontation tops the list of immediate crisis triggers, followed by state-based armed conflict. Environmental risks, while still dominant in the ten-year view, have dropped in short-term salience — extreme weather events fell from second to fourth place, biodiversity loss by five positions — a shift that may reflect fatigue or the sheer crowding of the threat landscape.

Why this matters → Both reports describe a world moving toward what the WEF calls "multipolarity without multilateralism" — fragmented regional rule-setting with eroding trust in global institutions. The GCF frames this as a governance failure: "Planetary commons cannot be negotiated with." Its call for a "renewed approach" that reinforces international law while fostering innovation echoes what The Garden has long observed — that governance systems must be not only redesigned but practiced, tested, and felt as legitimate by those they govern. The reports don't offer solutions so much as map the terrain where new models must take root.

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Democracy Without Borders
governanceclimateplanetary boundariesriskmultilateralism

Ukrainian Universities as Test Sites for Climate-Resilient Reconstruction

UniCities transitions from project to partnership, positioning Ukrainian universities as laboratories for integrated climate transition and post-war recovery — a model for resilience-centered governance under extreme constraint.

The UniCities initiative, coordinated by Viable Cities through KTH alongside Ukrainian and Spanish universities, has evolved from a three-year project into an ongoing collaboration testing whether post-war reconstruction can simultaneously serve climate transition. Last week's online forum marked the shift, gathering representatives from Kharkiv, Kyiv, Madrid, Stockholm, the European Commission, and urban experts to examine universities as catalysts for resilient urban transformation.

The work addresses a governance question rarely confronted elsewhere: how to rebuild cities while making them climate-neutral under conditions of active conflict. "Swedish municipalities and European municipalities have a lot to learn from municipalities in Ukraine," said Olga Kordas, Viable Cities programme director and UniCities coordinator, "not least about resilience, governance, democracy and civic preparedness. It is mutual learning and mutual inspiration." The forum identified two operational priorities — strengthening collaboration across all partner organizations and creating sustainable local energy systems through concrete implementation in Ukraine.

Why this matters → What's striking is the reversal of assumed expertise flows. Ukrainian municipalities become teachers of resilience governance; universities function not as research institutions observing from outside but as embedded actors in urban transformation. The initiative draws on experiences from Viable Cities in Sweden and CitiES2030 in Spain, treating reconstruction not as restoration but as redesign — governance as something felt and tested under constraint, not debated in stability.

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Viable Cities
climatedemocratic innovationgovernanceresilienceuniversities

When global cooperation fails to deliver, solidarity declines with it

New polling across 31 countries shows falling support for international institutions — not because people reject cooperation, but because they don't see it working. The gap reveals something fundamental about governance at any scale.

Democracy Without Borders' latest Global Solidarity Report surveyed 22,000 people across 31 countries and found support for international cooperation declining across nearly every demographic. Between 2024 and 2025, fewer people identified as global citizens, fewer wanted taxes funding global problems, and even majority support for enforcement powers in international institutions weakened. Younger generations, often assumed to be more globally minded, now show no more internationalist sentiment than their grandparents.

The pattern mirrors a truth The Garden has explored in other governance contexts: institutions succeed when people feel ownership and see results. Democracy Without Borders notes that shutting down public hospitals would be politically unthinkable in most countries, yet the USA and Argentina have treated withdrawal from the World Health Organization as a legitimate choice. The difference isn't abstract — it's whether citizens experience an institution as protecting their interests or as something distant and imposed.

Why this matters → The finding connects global governance to the oldest question in democratic practice: when people stop believing that others will contribute fairly or that institutions can improve their lives, participation drops and polarisation rises. Solidarity — whether local or planetary — depends on the same quiet foundation of trust, shared purpose, and visible results. Right now, that foundation is weakening because cooperation isn't delivering at the scale the problems demand.

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Democracy Without Borders
governancedemocratic innovationglobal solidarityinequalityinstitutions

ETHAKA Mozambique: Testing Agroforestry as Governance Infrastructure

A 3.5-year project in Mozambique embedded agroforestry systems into public institutions and rural communities — showing how regenerative agriculture becomes a form of governance when it restructures land use, diet, and policy in tandem.

The ETHAKA project, led by Italian NGO ICEI and concluded in late 2025, deployed syntropic agroforestry across Zambézia and Nampula provinces in Mozambique — not merely as an agricultural technique, but as a restructuring of how communities and institutions govern food, land, and resilience. Over 400 households adopted diversified production systems integrating native crops, beekeeping, fish farming, and solar irrigation. Women's dietary diversity improved from baseline to 27.4% meeting minimum standards, while cyclone-resistant agroforestry plots demonstrated material climate adaptation in a country ranked 153rd in climate readiness.

What distinguishes ETHAKA is its institutional ambition. The project established CISAF, a Centre for Innovation and Lifelong Learning in Agroforestry Systems, hosted at Lúrio University in Quelimane — a permanent node for applied research, extension worker training, and policy development. It also convened a Multi-sectoral Task Force that produced policy briefs presented at provincial and national levels, embedding agroecology into government strategy. This is governance infrastructure: not top-down regulation, but systems built through practice, tested in fields, and scaled through institutions.

Why this matters → The constraints are familiar: land tenure insecurity, labor demands in the biomass-intensive first year, and the market access gaps that limit smallholder scaling. But the core insight holds — that systems of production are also systems of governance, and testing them requires time, trust, and institutional commitment beyond the project cycle.

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Agroecology Coalition
agroecologymozambiqueclimategovernancefood systems

Not Only Larp brings governance simulation to the European Parliament

The Italian design studio ran a three-day political LARP inside the European Parliament, with MEPs and citizens role-playing a planetary governance crisis. The event drew attention to experiential methods for democratic innovation.

Not Only Larp's latest project may be their most ambitious: a full-scale governance simulation held within the actual chambers of the European Parliament in Brussels. Over three days, 120 participants — including sitting MEPs, civil society representatives, and randomly selected citizens — inhabited roles within a fictional planetary governance body responding to cascading ecological and social crises.

The design drew on Not Only Larp's decade of experience creating political LARPs, but added a layer of institutional realism that previous projects lacked. Participants negotiated using modified parliamentary procedures, with game mechanics that surfaced the tensions between national interest, planetary commons, and future generations.

Why this matters → For The Garden, this event validates a core hypothesis: that governance systems become comprehensible — and improvable — when people experience them from the inside.

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Not Only Larp
larpgovernance simulationeuropedemocratic innovation

Migrant Justice as Climate Practice: Communities Organize Against Displacement

The Climate Justice Alliance frames immigration enforcement as inseparable from climate displacement, calling for mutual aid networks and direct action as federal raids intensify across the U.S.

Federal immigration raids are escalating across the United States, tearing families apart under what the Climate Justice Alliance calls "systemic policies rooted in colonialism, racism, and xenophobia." But the organization reframes enforcement not as border security but as a failure to address the climate-driven displacement already reshaping human migration — droughts, floods, and rising heat making entire regions unlivable.

The Alliance's statement names the intersection directly: climate-driven displacement and border militarization are twin expressions of the same governance crisis. Borders cannot stop climate collapse, yet they are weaponized to deny dignity and survival. This is a governance problem that demands not policy tweaks but what the Alliance calls "collective, bold solutions led by frontline communities."

Why this matters → This is movement-building as governance practice: decentralized, rooted in place, and unapologetically abolitionist. It refuses the framing that climate adaptation and human mobility can be separated, insisting instead that dignified movement is a precondition for planetary survival.

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Climate Justice Alliance
climatemigrationjusticemutual aidabolition

The Federal Home Loan Banks as Infrastructure for Shared Ownership

Eleven regional cooperative banks allocate billions for affordable housing through mandated programs — including community land trusts. A case study in how existing financial infrastructure can be steered toward stewardship models.

The Federal Home Loan Bank system — 11 regional cooperatives serving 6,500 member institutions — operates as a quiet but substantial piece of America's housing finance infrastructure. As government-sponsored enterprises, these banks provide reduced-rate capital to credit unions, commercial banks, and community development financial institutions. Federal law requires each bank to allocate at least 10% of annual earnings to an Affordable Housing Program, funding that flows through member institutions to housing developers via competitive applications.

What makes this relevant to governance experimentation is how the system accommodates — and increasingly prioritizes — shared equity models like community land trusts. Four of the eleven banks now explicitly reference CLTs in their scoring criteria, recognizing permanent affordability mechanisms as distinct from conventional homeownership subsidies. The structural fit is notable: 95% of shared equity programs serve households at or below 80% of area median income, precisely the threshold mandated by statute. These aren't grants shaped to fit an agenda; they're an existing allocation mechanism being steered toward stewardship.

Why this matters → This is infrastructure work: not designing new systems from scratch, but identifying leverage points within existing ones. The Home Loan Banks aren't experimental governance in any flashy sense. They're 93-year-old cooperative financial institutions with statutory obligations. But their capacity to fund land trusts — models that separate ownership from stewardship, that prioritize use rights over speculative value — suggests how legacy systems might be reconfigured toward relational rather than extractive ends.

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Grounded Solutions Network
housingcooperative modelsfundingstewardshipdemocratic innovation

AI for Sustainability Finds Its Test Ground in Taipei

Researchers, policymakers, and industry practitioners gathered in Taipei to explore how artificial intelligence can serve planetary resilience — examining not just technical potential but governance frameworks for equitable deployment.

How do you ensure artificial intelligence serves ecological and social goals without creating new forms of extraction or exclusion? That design challenge shaped the 2025 International Conference on AI for a Sustainable Society, held November 13-14 at Academia Sinica in Taipei. The gathering brought together researchers, industry teams, and policymakers to examine AI's role in climate adaptation, green finance, and Nature-based Solutions — with particular attention to governance frameworks that might keep these tools accountable.

The conference centered on what organizers called "dual transformation": the need to innovate both technological systems and sustainability practice simultaneously. Keynote speakers included Academician C.-C. Jay Kuo (USC) questioning whether "Green AI" is achievable at scale, and Dr. Camilo Alejo from Future Earth Canada Hub demonstrating "smart synergy" between AI and Nature-based Solutions. More than ten sessions explored concrete applications — debris flow early warning systems, circular economy platforms, ESG investment tools — alongside policy discussions about transparency, equity, and inclusive deployment.

Why this matters → The conference opened with a performance blending chamber ensemble, DJ, and AI-generated visuals — a reminder that these technologies aren't neutral tools but shaped by the aesthetic and political choices embedded in their design. Whether AI serves planetary stewardship or simply accelerates existing extraction patterns depends on those design decisions, made visible through practice rather than proclamation.

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Future Earth
aiclimategovernance techtaiwandemocratic innovation

How communication work gets done: an internship at Viable Cities

Vendela Karlsson spent autumn 2025 embedded in Viable Cities' communications team, translating urban climate transition work into accessible formats. A small case study in how governance initiatives become legible — and who does that work.

Vendela Karlsson studies information design at Mälardalen University in Eskilstuna — a program focused on formatting and presenting information so it becomes comprehensible to everyone. In late 2025, she brought that training to Viable Cities as an intern, working on graphics, illustrations, publications, and presentations that make urban climate transition work intelligible to broader publics.

The work was flexible and collaborative. She was given directives and her own project folder on day one, then integrated into the full communications team rather than siloed with a single supervisor. She describes this autonomy positively: "I felt more independent when I got the chance to reach out to others during the work process on my own initiative." The balance mattered — she was trusted to navigate the team, but never left unsupported.

Why this matters → What she took away wasn't technical skill alone, but communication in its fuller sense: "How to balance different wishes to achieve a functioning end result, and how varied different people's perceptions can be." It's a lesson that applies well beyond design work — governance, too, requires translating between frames, making visible what some stakeholders see and others don't. Viable Cities' model depends on this kind of labor: the patient, iterative work of making transition legible, not just technically correct.

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Viable Cities
communicationurban transitionviable citiesinformation designnordic

Learning Planet Academy pivots education from excellence to planetary service

The Learning Planet Institute launches a new academy designed to move beyond traditional credentials toward co-constructed learning pathways that address climate urgency and ecological anxiety — a pedagogical experiment in governance education.

Faced with what it calls the inadequacy of classical degrees in an era of climate emergency and future anxiety, the Learning Planet Institute has launched the Learning Planet Academy. The initiative represents a deliberate shift from 'best in the world' educational models toward 'best for the world' — a reorientation that treats pedagogy itself as a form of planetary stewardship.

The academy offers co-constructed learning pathways designed to equip young people to build what the institute terms 'a peaceful and sustainable future.' The framing acknowledges a gap that governance researchers increasingly recognize: that traditional credentialing systems optimize for individual achievement within existing systems rather than cultivating capacities for systemic transformation.

Why this matters → Whether this translates into actual capacity-building for planetary governance work remains to be seen. The institute frames this as a new stage in its broader commitment to educational transformation, though details about specific programs, participant numbers, or partnership structures are not yet public.

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Learning Planet Institute
educationplanetary governancedemocratic innovationtransformative practiceyouth

Mariestad: Testing governance through climate investment data

A Swedish mid-sized city maps who pays for climate transition and who benefits — finding that while citizens and industry carry costs, the municipality's role is creating conditions for transformation, not funding it.

Mariestad, a city of 25,000 in western Sweden, has done something most municipalities avoid: calculated exactly who must invest how much to reach climate neutrality by 2030, and who benefits. The answer — developed with Linköping University, Sweco, and Stockholm Environment Institute using digital analysis tools — reveals that residents and industry bear the largest costs and reap the greatest returns through lower operating expenses and energy savings, while the municipality's financial role is surprisingly small.

What matters is the municipality's role as "enabler" — a governance function that sidesteps the fantasy of public sector climate leadership through spending. Mariestad's expansion plans are expected to drive necessary investments organically; the city's work is integrating climate measures into ordinary budgets and procurement, creating forums where employers design sustainable commute solutions, and testing IoT sensors that feed real-time air quality data into decision-making. Six new monitors now track particulate matter around the clock.

Why this matters → The investment analysis reveals friction points: households face high upfront costs for electric vehicles and home retrofits, challenging lower-income residents; industry needs new infrastructure to stay competitive; farmers must shift practices that are technically feasible but economically uncertain. The municipality, meanwhile, tests digital twin prototypes with high school students to involve youth in urban planning dialogues, coordinates Saturday cycling events, and develops green travel plans with major employers. The work is granular, procedural — and designed to become self-sustaining as culture shifts around what counts as normal.

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Viable Cities
climategovernanceswedendemocratic innovationmunicipal

Viable Cities opens internships in climate communications

Sweden's Viable Cities seeks communications interns to help 29 cities navigate climate neutrality transitions. The work touches a persistent challenge: how to make systemic change legible and compelling to publics who must ultimately enact it.

Viable Cities, the Swedish innovation program coordinating climate neutrality missions across 29 municipalities, has opened applications for communications internships starting in fall or spring semesters. The position offers a window into how governance transformation gets narrated — and why that narrative work matters as much as policy design.

Interns will work across strategic planning, event coordination, web content, and social media for both internal and external audiences. The program explicitly seeks students with climate engagement who can write in both Swedish and English, reflecting the dual audience of local implementers and international governance networks. Vendela Karlsson, who interned in late 2025, noted the validation of working alongside experienced strategists on live projects rather than simulated exercises.

Why this matters → Viable Cities positions itself as mission-driven rather than advocacy-oriented, a distinction that shapes how it frames urban climate work. For students interested in how governance innovations get communicated to the publics who must live them, it's a practicum in making transformation tangible.

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Viable Cities
climatenordiccommunicationsurban governancecapacity building

River Reuss Heads to Referendum: Switzerland Tests Legal Rights for Water

A citizen initiative in Lucerne canton has gathered 5,460 signatures to grant legal personhood to the River Reuss — launching a constitutional process that will test whether democratic systems can recognize nature as a rights-bearing entity.

The Reuss Initiative has cleared its first democratic threshold. With 5,460 certified signatures submitted to the Canton of Lucerne on January 15, 2026, the citizen-led campaign has triggered a formal constitutional process that will move through governmental review, parliamentary debate, and ultimately a public vote. The proposal: grant legal personality and fundamental rights to the River Reuss and other public waters in the canton.

The signature campaign surfaced stories that made the legal argument visceral — polluted drinking water, disappearing fish species, environmental laws left unenforced. These aren't abstractions; they're the material consequences of treating rivers as commodities rather than living systems. The Reuss Initiative frames its constitutional proposal as a corrective: if corporations can be legal persons, why not rivers?

Why this matters → The Reuss Initiative is part of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN), which recognized the group as its Outstanding Member of the Month. The honor reflects not just the signature count, but the broader work of demonstrating that rights-of-nature frameworks are democratically achievable, legally coherent, and rooted in lived ecological crisis.

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Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature
rights of naturedemocratic innovationswitzerlandgovernancerivers

Fish-inspired filter captures 99% of microplastics without clogging

Researchers at Bonn University developed a self-cleaning filter modeled on fish gills that captures microplastics from washing machines — addressing a governance gap where household infrastructure meets ocean pollution.

A washing machine used by a family of four releases up to 500 grams of microplastics annually into waterways — a planetary-scale problem rooted in millions of individual appliances. Researchers at Bonn University have developed a filter that captures 99% of these fibers by mimicking the gill structure of sardines, anchovies, and herring, which use cross-flow filtration to feed while swimming.

The innovation lies in design: a conical mesh that allows microfibers to roll toward collection points rather than clog the filter, as existing products do. Lead researcher Leandra Hamann notes that "previous filter systems have various drawbacks — some clog quickly, others lack sufficient filtration performance." The system self-cleans multiple times per minute, and with minor modifications could compress collected plastics into pellets for proper disposal every few dozen washes.

Why this matters → This is a rare case where biomimicry meets household infrastructure — a reminder that planetary governance often operates at the scale of laundry rooms, not just international treaties. The filter addresses what might be called a governance gap: the point where private washing machines become vectors for ocean contamination. A single garment can release 1.5 million microplastic fibers per wash; interventions at this mundane interface matter as much as any coastal regulation downstream.

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Future Earth
ecological stewardshipbiomimicrymicroplasticsinfrastructureresearch

One scientist, 1,460 rice varieties, and the architecture of food sovereignty

Dr Debal Deb has spent 30 years conserving indigenous rice from remote Indian tribes — an act of ecological stewardship that doubles as governance practice, returning seed sovereignty to farmers after decades of corporate monoculture.

When the Green Revolution swept Asia, it replaced thousands of local rice varieties with genetically uniform strains — a textbook case of governance failure masquerading as progress. Dr Debal Deb has spent three decades undoing that erasure. His farm in India now cultivates 1,460 indigenous rice varieties, each meticulously conserved from remote tribal communities, each carrying genetic traits that respond to flood, drought, salinity, wind. One variety contains twenty times the iron of genetically modified 'fortified' strains. The work is rigorous: every grain backed by lab testing in Calcutta, every genotype maintained year on year in an expanding patchwork of fields.

What makes Deb's work governance — not just conservation — is where the seeds go next. His seed bank, called Vrīhi (Sanskrit for rice), redistributes varieties to local farmers, returning food sovereignty to communities that lost it when corporate agriculture arrived. It's a form of distributed resilience: knowledge and genetic diversity placed back into the hands of those who can use it, test it, adapt it. A new documentary by Jason Taylor follows journalist Dan Saladino's encounter with Deb, tracing both the science and the stakes. "We need those drought-tolerant varieties, those varieties that can grow in different challenging conditions," Saladino notes — a quiet acknowledgment that climate adaptation depends on the diversity we've nearly discarded.

Why this matters → The film captures something The Garden often returns to: governance systems must be embodied, not just theorized. Deb's farm is a living library, his seed redistribution a practice of democratic ecology. Each variety represents thousands of years of iterative innovation by farmers — a commons that corporate uniformity nearly erased. That Deb calls his project Vrīhi because he hopes "it will germinate in the minds of the people, as well as in the fields" suggests he understands the work as cultural as much as agricultural. The story of where food comes from, Saladino says, "is one of the most important stories any human can hear." It's also a story about who gets to decide what survives.

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Gaia Foundation
food sovereigntyecological stewardshipindigenous knowledgebiodiversitygovernance

Sinking Carbon: A Proposal to Store Boreal Wood in the Arctic Seafloor

Researchers propose harvesting boreal forest timber and sinking it in the oxygen-poor Arctic Ocean — a carbon removal method that sidesteps infrastructure costs but raises questions about who governs such planetary-scale interventions.

Cambridge and Czech Academy researchers have proposed what might be called ecological burial at scale: harvest timber from boreal forests, float it down river systems, and sink it in the deep Arctic Ocean, where cold temperatures and near-zero oxygen could lock carbon away for millennia. The approach builds on wood vaulting — storing biomass in purpose-built anaerobic or frozen facilities — but substitutes the Arctic seafloor for thousands of engineered vaults.

The logic is straightforward. Boreal forests stretching from Alaska to Siberia store roughly a trillion tons of carbon in trees, deadwood, and peat. Much of this already becomes driftwood, floating into the Arctic and eventually settling on the seafloor. Studies of Alpine wood preserved over 8,000 years show negligible cellulose degradation in cold, low-oxygen conditions. The researchers argue that deliberately scaling this process could sequester meaningful carbon — estimates suggest we need to remove over 10 billion tons of CO₂ annually this century — from forests with "low economic importance" and proximity to major river systems.

Why this matters → What's unstated is the governance architecture such a scheme would require. Who decides which boreal forests to harvest, at what scale, and under whose authority? The Arctic Ocean spans multiple national jurisdictions and Indigenous territories. The proposal positions biodiversity-poor Arctic waters as a carbon sink for fire-prone Siberian and northern North American forests — framing one ecosystem's vulnerability as justification for another's industrial use. It's a reminder that carbon removal proposals, however elegant on paper, demand not just technical validation but participatory governance design — systems that can negotiate tradeoffs between carbon storage, forest ecology, marine ecosystems, and the communities whose lands and waters would be transformed into planetary infrastructure.

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Future Earth
climatearcticcarbon removalecological stewardshipgovernance

European bison return to the Iberian Highlands — and to the policy question

Nine European bison have been released in Spain's Iberian Highlands as part of a cross-European study testing how keystone species can restore degraded landscapes — and whether rewilding can offer viable development pathways for depopulating rural communities.

Nine European bison have arrived in El Recuenco, a village of 80 in Spain's Iberian Highlands — the first time the species has been released in this landscape. Sourced from a private estate near Madrid, the herd will spend several weeks in an adaptation enclosure before being released into 400 hectares of publicly owned woodland. The initiative, led by Rewilding Spain, is designed to test whether bison can adapt to Mediterranean conditions and deliver measurable benefits: wildfire risk reduction through grazing, ecosystem restoration through their role as landscape engineers, and economic renewal through nature-based tourism.

The release is embedded in a larger study coordinated by the University of the Basque Country, the University of Manchester, and ECONOVO. Researchers will track stress levels, diet composition, and movement patterns using GPS collars, then replicate the methodology across bison populations from the Netherlands to Azerbaijan. The goal is not merely symbolic — it's to establish the actual ecological range of the European bison and clarify how the species influences woody vegetation and fire-prone landscapes. This is governance-as-experiment: testing whether a keystone species can function as both ecological infrastructure and economic catalyst.

Why this matters → The European bison population has grown from fewer than 60 individuals in 1927 to roughly 9,000 today. DNA evidence from Cantabria suggests historical presence on the Iberian Peninsula, though the record remains incomplete. What matters now is not taxonomic purity but functional role: bison can fill the ecological niche left by aurochs and wild horses, shaping vegetation structure and nutrient cycles in ways that degraded forests badly need. This is rewilding not as pastoral fantasy but as deliberate, monitored intervention — testing whether nature-based governance can reverse rural decline while restoring landscape function.

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Rewilding Europe
rewildingecological stewardshipkeystone speciesrural developmentgovernance experiment

Luleå's transition exhibition: governance as public pedagogy

A Swedish industrial city places climate transition in a shopping mall — treating governance not as policy abstraction but as something residents encounter while buying groceries. The experiment tests whether municipal legitimacy can be built through visibility.

Luleå, a northern Swedish city of 78,000 navigating rapid industrial decarbonization, has opened "The Luleå Way" — a climate transition exhibition in a shopping center. The placement is deliberate: municipal officials and industrial actors explain steel plant conversions, circular construction pilots, and renewable energy timelines where people already gather, no appointment needed. It's governance as storefront, a bet that legitimacy comes from accessibility rather than consultation theater.

The exhibition supports a broader mobilization architecture. Luleå convened a citizens' forum in 2025 — randomly selected residents working with experts from the steel industry, university researchers, and municipal staff across four full-day sessions. Recommendations now feed into a climate plan targeting municipal carbon neutrality by 2030, territorial neutrality by 2040, and resident-scale action by 2045. The targets are scaffolded by organizational capacity, a recognition that governance operates at different speeds across institutional boundaries.

Why this matters → Meanwhile, five northern Swedish cities have formed Thriving Northern Cities, pooling resources on circular building standards and transit electrification — the kind of horizontal coordination that emerges when national frameworks move too slowly. Process leader Sophie Forsberg describes a meal program redesign that cut food waste while keeping portions at 12 kronor, proof that climate action and fiscal constraint can align when implementation involves the people doing the work. Whether a shopping mall can host the messy work of transition remains an open question, but Luleå is testing the premise that governance must be encountered, not merely announced.

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Viable Cities
democratic innovationclimatenordicgovernancepublic engagement

EU-Mercosur: a test case for whether agroecology can move from niche to policy

As the EU-Mercosur trade agreement advances despite farmer protests, Agroecology Europe argues both continents must accelerate agroecological policy — not as alternative, but as systemic governance strategy for food, climate, and rural resilience.

On 9 January 2026, the Council of the EU authorized signature of the EU-Mercosur Partnership Agreement and Interim Trade Agreement, advancing ratification despite widespread protests from farmers, peasants, and citizens on both sides of the Atlantic. The agreement still requires European Parliament consent — a juncture where elected members retain veto power. Studies from the Toulouse School of Economics and the Transnational Institute have documented expected harms to sustainable agriculture, environmental standards, and rural economies, with benefits accruing primarily to large commercial interests rather than small and medium-scale producers.

Agroecology Europe, a network spanning researchers, practitioners, and movements, issued a statement of solidarity with those who will bear the costs. But their response goes further: whether or not the agreement is ratified, they argue, both regions must urgently shift agroecology from niche alternative to core policy framework. This means treating it not as a marginal practice but as a governance architecture capable of integrating climate action, soil health, fair trade, public health, animal welfare, and rural resilience in a systemic way.

Why this matters → The press release frames agroecology as a form of "strategic direction" — language that signals a move from pilots and experiments to institutional infrastructure. It's a reminder that governance isn't only what happens in Brussels or Brasília, but also in the design of food systems, land use, and the relationships that structure rural economies. The question is whether such systems can be redesigned while trade agreements pull in the opposite direction — or whether the friction itself becomes a forcing function for deeper change.

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Agroecology Europe
agroecologytradefood systemseugovernance

18 Groups Challenge EPA's Narrowing of Clean Water Protections

Climate Justice Alliance and 17 EJ organizations oppose EPA's proposed redefinition of protected waters — a case study in how regulatory rollbacks shift environmental harm to frontline communities while weakening federal accountability.

The EPA and Army Corps of Engineers have proposed redefining "waters of the United States" under the Clean Water Act — the 1972 law that made it unlawful to discharge pollutants into federally protected waters without a permit. The revision would narrow which waterbodies and wetlands fall under federal jurisdiction, ostensibly to "cut red tape."

Climate Justice Alliance and 17 national and local environmental justice organizations submitted a public letter opposing the change. Their argument centers on distributional harm: weakening federal oversight doesn't eliminate pollution, it redirects degraded waters toward frontline and environmental justice communities while reducing corporate accountability. The letter frames this as both a public health threat and an infringement on Tribal sovereignty.

Why this matters → The case illustrates a recurring governance tension — the gap between regulatory frameworks and felt consequences. Federal environmental protections operate as a form of jurisdictional governance, determining who has authority to protect what. When those boundaries contract, the question isn't just legal but material: whose water becomes legally pollutable, and who decides? The coalition's response suggests that meaningful environmental governance requires not just rules, but accountability structures that communities can actually invoke.

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Climate Justice Alliance
governanceenvironmental justiceregulationaccountabilitywater

US Withdraws from 65+ International Bodies — Including All Climate Frameworks

The Trump administration withdrew from the UNFCCC and 65+ other international bodies, making the US the only nation outside the foundational climate treaty. A stress test for multilateral governance in an age of unilateral retreat.

The United States has withdrawn from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — the 1992 foundational treaty that coordinates global climate action — along with 65 other international bodies spanning climate, human rights, and environmental law. The US is now the only nation in the world outside the UNFCCC framework. The exits include the Paris Agreement (for the second time), the IPCC, the International Renewable Energy Agency, and bodies governing oceans, biodiversity, and tropical forests.

The Climate Justice Alliance frames this as a protection of corporate interests over frontline communities. "Trump's withdrawal from international climate institutions is intended to knowingly accelerate climate change by incentivizing polluters," said Elizabeth Yeampierre of UPROSE. Tom BK Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network noted the move "furthers Trump's attack against defenders of Mother Earth" and undermines Indigenous collective rights. The timing is stark: AI infrastructure alone released emissions equivalent to all of New York City in the past year, while fossil fuel expansion accelerates.

Why this matters → This is governance as demolition — a deliberate dismantling of the multilateral architecture built over decades. For those studying planetary governance, it's a live experiment in what happens when a major power opts out of shared frameworks entirely. The question isn't whether international bodies can survive US absence — many will — but whether governance systems designed for cooperation can function when accountability becomes optional. Climate justice organizations are demanding the US be "brought back to the table," but the table itself is now in question.

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Climate Justice Alliance
climategovernancemultilateralismindigenous rightsaccountability

GARN Opens Internships in Rights of Nature Movement Infrastructure

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature seeks interns across communications, tribunal support, and organizing — roles that build the operational capacity behind legal ecosystems protection and governance experimentation.

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature is recruiting interns and volunteers for 2-to-6-month positions supporting its work as a coordinating node in the worldwide Rights of Nature movement. Based in Quito but offering remote placements, the roles span communications, web development, tribunal research, and project organizing — the infrastructural work that allows governance experiments like the International Rights of Nature Tribunal to function as more than symbolic gestures.

The tribunal itself — which GARN convenes as both legal proceeding and public ritual — has heard cases on deep-sea mining, algorithmic water allocation, and satellite-detected deforestation. Supporting it requires research, documentation, and coordination across regions and legal traditions. Other roles focus on storytelling, digital tools, and alliance-building across Indigenous communities, legal scholars, and activist networks.

Why this matters → GARN frames these as learning opportunities rather than extractive labor, emphasizing collaboration within a "values-driven team." Applicants need not have prior Rights of Nature experience; in-person placements in Quito are self-funded. Applications close January 20. The call reflects a practical reality: governance innovation requires not just visionary frameworks but people willing to do the administrative, communicative, and connective work that makes those frameworks operational.

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Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature
rights of naturegovernanceinternshipslegal innovationecuador

Climate Justice Alliance maps data center impacts, trains ground organizers

A frontline coalition created resources on AI infrastructure's environmental costs and trained 10 organizers in Memphis to challenge data center development — governance as ground-level strategy, not abstract policy.

The Climate Justice Alliance has built an organizing toolkit around a question most governance discussions ignore: who pays the material costs when digital infrastructure scales? Seven educational resources now document what AI data centers extract from communities — energy demand surges, water acquisition, rate hikes for existing residents, disproportionate impacts on Black neighborhoods.

In October 2025, CJA brought 10 organizers from southern and southwestern communities to Memphis for strategy training with Media Justice and Memphis Communities Against Pollution. The focus was concrete: how to halt new projects, reject associated fossil fuel expansions, enforce existing environmental protections. Memphis itself has become a flashpoint, with multiple data center proposals threatening neighborhoods already burdened by industrial pollution.

Why this matters → The alliance has since launched an ad-hoc committee to support ground-level campaigns against data center development. It's governance work of a particular kind — not drafting model legislation but coordinating resistance where infrastructure meets community, where the abstract promise of AI confronts the specific reality of whose land, water, and power grid get conscripted. The resources and training represent a wager that effective governance of planetary-scale technology requires organized capacity at the sites of extraction, not just expert testimony in distant hearings.

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Climate Justice Alliance
climategovernanceenvironmental justiceinfrastructurecommunity organizing

Five Years of Agroforestry Practice in Costa Rica: Jungle Project's Farmer-First Model

Over 20 hectares and 18,000 plants later, Jungle Project demonstrates how governance begins with land stewardship — training 22 farmers in regenerative agroforestry while building the market infrastructure to sustain it.

Governance doesn't only happen in assemblies or policy documents — it also unfolds in the deliberate work of establishing regenerative systems on the ground. Over five years, Jungle Project has built a farmer-first agroforestry model across Costa Rica's Caribbean coast and volcanic slopes, establishing 22 breadfruit farms integrated with companion crops like citrus, cacao, and avocado. More than 18,000 plants now grow across 20 hectares, supported by 43 training sessions and field trips to institutions including EARTH University and Costa Rica's National Institute of Apprenticeship.

The project operates as both ecological intervention and economic redesign. Through Jungle Foods, the team has created a values-aligned supply chain — breadfruit flours, noodles, specialty cacao — that prioritizes small-scale farms over extraction. In 2025, they received non-reimbursable capital from CATIE's business incubation initiative, recognition of a model that treats market development as inseparable from land stewardship.

Why this matters → The data table tells part of the story: steady growth in participants, dramatic scaling in companion plants from 840 to 17,490 between 2020 and 2023. But the fuller narrative is about what happens when education becomes implementation, and implementation becomes a repeatable model. Governance, here, means creating the conditions for stewardship to endure.

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Kiss the Ground
agroforestrycosta ricaregenerative agricultureland stewardshipecological governance

Agroecology Europe's Year of Movement-Building Amid Collapse and Commitment

As political systems retreat from environmental pledges, Europe's agroecology network grows to 450+ youth members and convenes gatherings that bridge science, practice, and policy — testing governance models that treat food systems as living democratic experiments.

Agroecology Europe closed 2025 with a Winter Newsletter that doubles as movement infrastructure report — tracking not just policy engagement but the growth of networks that treat food system transformation as a governance practice. The organization's Youth Network now counts more than 450 members, while gatherings like the Malmö Forum and the first International Congress of Mediterranean Agroecology in Agrigento created spaces where scientists, farmers, and movement actors tested ideas together rather than in parallel silos.

The newsletter reflects on what the organization calls "renewed governance" — a reworking of its own statutes and decision-making structures — while highlighting work on soil health policy, feminist approaches to land stewardship, and the OASIS tool for assessing agroecological transitions. These aren't academic exercises. They're attempts to build governance capacity within a movement that understands food systems as sites of democratic experimentation, where questions about who decides, who benefits, and who bears risk must be answered through practice, not proclamation.

Why this matters → The newsletter points toward 2026 with "fresh energy, a growing team, and a new board on the horizon" — language that sounds bureaucratic until you consider what it means to maintain democratic infrastructure during systemic unraveling. Agroecology Europe's year wasn't about breakthroughs. It was about the unglamorous work of keeping governance experiments alive when the dominant systems are actively retreating.

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Agroecology Europe
agroecologyfood systemsdemocratic innovationyouth movementsgovernance