Regenerative Economies with Kate Raworth & John Fullerton

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, I'm Josie Warden, head of Regenerative Design at the RSA. And I'm Daniel Val, author of Designing Regenerative Cultures. You're listening to the Regeneration Rising podcast. In this series, we look at how regenerative approaches can help us build thriving communities and ecosystems and provide a better life for all on our planet. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, and welcome to the Regeneration Rising podcast. I'm Josie Warden, and this is episode four in our seven-part series. The words "economy" and "ecology" have the same root in ancient Greek, "oicos," meaning "home." In an ear remarked by climate breakdown and profound social challenges, what is our economy telling us about our home? And what is our home planet Earth telling us about our economy? Today, we look at new models for structuring our economies with our guests Kate Rayworth and John Fullerton. Kate is a renegade economist, focusing on exploring the economic mindset needed to address the 21st century social and ecological challenges. Her internationally acclaimed framework of donor economics has been widely influential amongst sustainable development thinkers, progressive businesses, and political activists. The donor economics action lab is now working with communities around the world to put it into practice in our neighborhoods and cities. John Fullerton is an impact investor, writer, and unconventional economist, and is founder of the Capital Institute. He is author of "Regenerative Capitalism," how universal passions and principles will shape the new economy, and is supporting many more people to explore what regenerative economics could look like through a new course, which brings together leading thinkers across economy, business, and finance. Kate and John, thank you so much for joining us for today's conversation. John, can I start with you? After 20 years on Wall Street, you walked away from your role as a managing partner at J.P. Morgan. Why did you do this and how did you move towards regenerative economics? Sure, thanks, Josie, and good to be with you all. The short version is that I walked away mostly on intuition and gut feel. I didn't really have a logical reason. I just felt I needed to create some space and a break for myself. And so I just left with really no plans and lots of questions about what I was meant to be and what I was meant to do. And then I experienced 9/11 up close and personal that summer. And that really pushed me into a deep, introspective, sort of my deep-think period. And during that, I started reading books that bankers don't normally read. And I'll just mention one, "Limits to Growth," which we're now celebrating the 50th anniversary of, really shook me to my core and made me realize that the economic system, the finance system that drives the economy and therefore people like me had some serious rethinking to do. And that's what really set me on the path. And Kate, I really like the description of you being a renegade economist. What has your journey been to this point? So my path was also one of walking away. And it was interesting to hear John using that very language because I walked away not from the world of finance and business. I walked away from academic economics. So I was studying economic at university and so frustrated by the frames that I was being taught but couldn't quite name why, couldn't quite find an alternative. And I found we were always trying to beg a social and ecological issues into the frame to try to make them visible, trying to justify why they should be taken into account, make an economic case for a county for them. And I just didn't want to be called an economist. I was embarrassed of that label. And so I didn't stay on and do the PhD as was expected that you do. I walked away and immersed myself in the real world economy and learned so much more about how people actually engage in an economy working with microponers in the villages of Zanzibar for three years. Working at UN on the Human Development Report for four years, putting humanity at the centre of our vision rather than growth in economics. And also frustration of, well, we put humanity at the centre of our vision in human development. Where's the living planet? This was still missing. And I worked at Oxband for a decade. And it was actually after the financial crisis in 2008 when I heard so many people saying, "Well, it's clearly time to rewrite economics or it reflects financial realities." And I just thought, I'll be damned if we're only going to rewrite it for that. What about the ecological reality of climate breakdown? What about the social realities that have always been missing? And I had actually just come back to work from being on maternity leave raising twins for a year. So I was really immersed in the household economy that unpaid care and love economy as Hazel Henderson called it. The love economy. And somebody showed me this diagram of like, you know, what's been happening while you've been away. And there was this diagram of massive red lines overshooting the limits of the planet. It was the planetary boundaries diagram created by your and rock strongwill, Stefan and other systems scientists. And I didn't know anything about a system science. This was new to me. I'd never learned any of this, but it just hit me with real excitement because I saw this diagram of what was this is the beginning of a new economics. Of course, it's never the beginning. There is no beginning. It's always a continuation. But this is making visible in metrics and in science, what Herman Daly saw so long ago that the economy must thrive within the living world. And we are so overshooting the living world. And so I doodle on that diagram. And I, you know, they create an outer limit of ecological overshoot. So I drew an inner limit of human rights. I was sitting in a massive Oxfam office working, you know, people working on tackling famine, tackling rights abuses. And I brought the social into the ecological and this circle turned into a donor. And the last thing I'll just say now is that I was amazed by the traction that that image had. I actually put it in the bottom of my desk draw at the beginning because I thought, well, you know, I like drawings. I like pictures, but what's anybody else going to say to that? And when we actually published it as a discussion paper for Oxfam, I was completely blown away by how much people responded to it. And we're motivated by it. And actually we're empowered by it. And I could see people who'd wanted to make these arguments for a long time using it as like a platform to stand on, that they could then make their argument for that. And it made me realize the power of pictures and our visual framing. And that led me to come back to economics, to walk back towards it, but to flip it on its head and reframe it visually. And that's really, you know, in this big teamwork that we're all part of, I wanted to bring the visual reframing of an economics that actually makes sense, that starts with human rights and ecological integrity. And then we move from there. I like the way both of you picked up on that sense of intuition. And just building on those reflections, I wonder if you could share a bit about what regeneration means to you and how it shapes your work. So my discovery of regeneration came through initially through my practice with Alan Sabry. But Alan didn't use the word regeneration. It was really my introduction to Bill Reed and the Regenesis group where I first encountered it. And to me, it was this-- it was one of a series of aha moments, like Kate described. For sure, when I saw the planetary boundaries, it was a massive aha. But this idea of regeneration is not a word. It's actually literally the process of how life works. And living system scientists have learned a lot about it. There aren't, in my understanding, there aren't analogous laws of the way there are laws in physics. There are processes and patterns and tendencies in living systems. And regeneration is at the core of it. And so to me, the word is absent any human unique qualities or characteristics. It's actually bigger than humanity. It's about all life. And my thesis is very simple, which is that the human economy is a living system. And the defense of that is that human beings are living systems. That doesn't seem to be controversial. Gaia herself is a living system. That is somewhat controversial, but less so than it was in the past. And if the human economy properly understood is embedded in Gaia, made up of humans, then if it's to be, quote, "sustainable," if it's to thrive, it must follow the same processes and patterns and principles. Or while other living systems that have stood the test of time. And the wonderful sort of independent validation check on that is that the regenerative process happens to be highly aligned. It's not the same thing, but highly aligned with the wisdom traditions that have stood the test of time as well. And when I say wisdom traditions, I mean Asian, Southeast Asian, Western, and indigenous. And so here you have life itself. And human wisdom traditions all pointing in the same direction. So I think of it as sort of our North Star from a design point of view that we need to align with. And separate from our human values, because our human values are just human values. And one of the areas where my approach to this is probably a little different than many peoples is that I try to understand how the human economy might work, even if we don't have shared human values. because unfortunately we don't all share the same human values and and and that's become increasingly clear and in our divisiveness. So system scientists use the language of empowered participation and so I use that language which implies that the economy creates shared well-being but it's more important than that. It actually implies that if we're to have a healthy system all of the participants of the system need to be empowered to contribute to the health of the system. So I take a very living system science understanding of the word regeneration and then align it with the wisdom traditions and come up with what for me is kind of a true north of where we need to move with our economic system design and by the way our financial system design which needs to be understood as embedded in in the economy and not the other way around. And Kate what does regeneration evoke for you and how does it connect with your work? So I was similarly actually originally struck by the diagram by Bill Reid and Pamela Mang I believe of the regenerative group. The spiraling sense of we're coming out of the degenerative and it passes through the little point that called sustainable the word that has dominated discourse for so long but that's a mere passing point of zero do no harm through to this incredible alternative world in which we literally regenerate and restore and repair and belong. That was so striking to me because I realized that it had been that even possibility had been completely absent from my intellectual training. We were always only ever trying to minimize damage you know aping towards that little sustainability point and there was no possibility of another another world on the other side and for me the comparison of concepts has always been really useful so from from what to what and so from degenerative to regenerative I find really helpful to them look around and realize we are we've inherited a degenerative industrial system and when we describe it to ourselves we feel it and there's a quote from John Tillman Lyle that I really struck me as well he said eventually a one-way system destroys the landscapes on which it depends. The clock is always running and the flows always approaching the time when they can flow no more. In its essence this is a degenerative system devouring the sources of its own sustenance and that sits so in opposition to the vision that John just spoke so beautifully too and which was absolutely one of the original inspirations for me when I met John was it in 2013 2014 you were with you were traveling around we met in Stockholm didn't we and you were talking about regenerative finance I remember and I was so struck by this possibility of inverting things and also incredibly inspired by Janine Benius talking about life creating conditions conducive to life and I know it's not Janine alone who speaks this but she speaks in such a poetic way that that really struck me and of course Daniel's work and by the way I'm totally thrilled to be in this conversation with two people who have so massively inspired me over the years so in writing Donut economics what I was trying to do was say if we take the donut as a starting point and it's just one version of a compass for thriving humanity in the living world where we meet the needs of all people within the means of this delicately balanced living planet and if we place that as a starting point not something we beg for or hope for or try to plead for and make a case for and make a business case for we start with that then we invite the world of economics the world of markets and business and regulation we invite them to the table and say what kind of designs and I use the word design as equally intentional is John what kind of designs would be actually compatible with we generating these conditions conducive to life and then we have a completely different conversation the onus is on the mainstream institutions and designs to redesign themselves to to figure out the deep principles that I think John has articulated so beautifully that the deep principles that must surely shape where we go so for me that's that's where it comes from and I do I do speak of both regenerative and distributive design and I again I think it's where we're starting from that the places we're standing in this conversation but I was I was doing this work from within a social justice organization and because though I think the frame of regenerative was originally where I heard coming from from from an ecological perspective it's not necessary that people coming from a social justice perspective would hear that this this embraces all of our issues too and so I wanted to bring both of those dynamics and I totally understand that a system that's truly regenerative will of course be distributive but I it felt important to me and I think this is something about the words and the framing or where we're standing from we might highlight different aspects of it and I want to say I think Daniel's book and work is is a such an incredible source book in this area and such an incredible synthesis of so many people's ideas that it and that then it creates it's a whole new space and possibility and I think we need so many more examples and works that bring these qualities out because a lot of people in the world are now saying what is regenerative and I think we all of us are only just beginning to learn and learn from other traditions and wisdoms that have always been there so I'm not going to say this is what regenerative is I'm feeling my way towards it having a very strong sense this is where life is wonderful and I'm just so excited also about this and already you you highlighted two things like John highlighting that we really need to stop thinking that we need to all agree exactly on everything in order to redesign the human impact on earth if we only agree on a few things which is how to realign with life's regenerative patterns how to create a playing field that makes us collaborate rather than compete then we can begin to align with that pattern in a way that allows us to live our diversity in different places the place where the rubber meets the road to some extent has to be at a different scale than the current overshooting globalized economy that has no biophysical boundaries it has to be brought home to place to communities and to bioregion to a regional scale and so we're coming back to another inside that is almost a hundred years old Patrick Geddes who was a biologist and also founder of Town Planning and said we need to redesign our human affairs in a bioregional context and I'd love to hear both of you speak to place and region a little bit okay so when I was writing the book that economics my goal was to transform the economics curriculum that's what I would that's what I was so frustrated and angry with that I wanted to rewrite the place where I'd come from right but the education that I'd been given that was what I was aiming at that's actually the place it's had the least impact so and I very quickly I was mother of two small children when first came out and so I realized I'm not gonna I'm not gonna waste my time knocking on shut doors I'm gonna go where the energy is and respond to who does come and some cities and places and people start to say well you know what we've got here is a global doughnut but what would it mean to do it here in our town in our region in our nation in our city or district and then actually around the same time Jeanine Benius got in touch with me and she said I'm working on transformation of place with the principles of biomimicry and I want to bring the doughnut into that story and it was actually a mashup of Jeanine's ideas in mind that we put them together and created a way of downscaling the doughnut to a place so we ask this question for any place and let me let me pitch it as a city but it could be any town or village or place how can our city be a home to thriving people in a thriving place while respecting the well-being of all people and the health of the whole planet and what we've got going on there is local aspirations to be thriving people in a thriving local habitat while recognizing we have an impact on the whole planet and the well-being of all people through global supply chains and the deep interconnectedness of the global economy but Jeanine's work brings it to place let me zoom in there so we say how can we be thriving people have the health and education and housing and in-carbon political voice for all people in our community and then Jeanine's beautiful question is how can this place be as generous as the wildland next door and so if Jeanine were with us in this city that we are imagining transforming and enabling to live with the doughnut Jeanine would say okay take me to the wildland next door like where is the nearest wild healthy and I use the world the world politically here where is the nearest healthy natural habitat of this place because every place on the on the the skin of planet earth is a unique place it's up a mountain or in a valley it's in the tropics in in temperate and nature has a genius of thriving everywhere nature has figured out of millennia how to store carbon and house by diversity how to cool the climate and store groundwater after a storm how to make us feel at home nature has a genius of Jeanine generosity of generating these benefits that reproduce the conditions that conducive to life in every place. And what if those generosity of nature became the standards that our cities aspire to? So if the wildland next door is cooling the air from the treetops to the forest floor by about seven degrees on a hot day, what would it mean to design cities that do the same so that they mimic the generosity next door? And what I loved about that when I first struck by it was wildly ambitious and literally utterly natural that we should create human settlements that aim to belong, that just aim to be nestled in the ecosystems of which they're apart and on which they depend. So that's the local ecological question of downscating the doughnut to a place. And then, and of course that means you immediately are connected to your bio region and honoring place and community as John's principle so beautifully say. And I'll just add that it also says, well, we need to look at our global responsibilities, recognizing that so much of what we use in a place, the food and the clothing and the electronics goods and the construction materials and consumer goods, they may have been imported from all over the world. So it's not enough just to say what is our relation to our local bio region, we need to say and how are we impacting on the whole planet, our carbon footprint, our material footprint, fertiliser and land use worldwide, we need to come back with implanted boundaries across our entire footprint. So we look at the ecological impact across those two scales. And this is what we're doing with cities. I'm going to Barcelona next week because the city of Barcelona is one of the most recent cities saying, "We really want to use this framework because all four of these aspects, ecological and social, the local and the global matter to us, they are part of the place that we want to become." And so we're exploring with cities and learning with them what it means to actually bring this into practice. I love everything you just said Kate, and your work with cities has been an extraordinary success. It's interesting, I wrote a blog years ago called City States Rising and made the case that the cities would be the natural kind of organizing scale of this new economy that we needed. My pathway into place and bio regions, and as Kate mentioned, one of the eight principles I talk about is honors, community and place. And interestingly, it was the only principle that in working with my science advisor Sally Gornor, it was the only principle that was contentious. We spent hours, hours, over weeks discussing whether that was actually a principle of how life works. Anyway, I ended up ignoring her advice on this one, although I listened to her advice on most things because there is something just innately true about place. I draw on Wendell Berry has this beautiful expression, there are no unsecret places, there are only sacred places and desecrated places. And that just speaks to me that, and the regentist's people talk about the essence of place, just like there's an essence of a human being or any living, an essence of a tree. And so it, for me, community and place moves into the more spiritual to be candid. And yet it seems logical to me that life happens in place. I have an expression of throw out, see if it lands well, but I like to say that every snowflake is unique, but every snowflake looks like a snowflake. The living systems, the regenerative process will look very different in every unique context, but the principles, if they're true first principles, will be the same. But the reality is, and I've learned this the hard way, the context has to come first, because in the context, there is the local trauma. And everyone has trauma, every place has trauma, but people, if we don't deal with the trauma, and I've added the word in son of a lot of things I do, the word reconciliation. And I think if we don't understand the essence of place and the trauma in that place and the people in that place, and put that on the table first, then the rest of this stuff will never land. It's really hard, but the trauma in Barcelona is going to be very different than the trauma in Oakland, California, and they will see their world very differently. And I'll sit there and say, yeah, but it's all snowflakes. And they'll say, no, it's not all snowflakes, but both are true. I think that's so powerful. And I guess from my perspective, I discovered this world of regenerative thinking from a starting point of circular economy, and seeing that there was this huge gap in that conversation around place and context and culture. And it felt like we were almost reaching a point of being place agnostic, which I was seeing reflected across other areas as well. But recently it feels like there's been a real cultural shift as you were saying there, John, around the need, that sense of like local need, and recognizing that places are unique in their experiences, and that this, that this thinking really requires a shift in our approach. Could you both talk a bit about how you've engaged with people in places and what your experience has been around that particular cultural shift? This is really where my energy is sitting now. I'll just share, you know, the experience we just had on this course was 350 people from 25 countries, many business people. And, you know, we set out to create an introductory course on regenerative economics. We called it intro to regenerative economics, new ways of seeing, being, and managing in the 21st century. And honestly, what happened was it can only be described as a kind of consciousness, a shared consciousness shifting, you know, I hate to use the word spiritual because that turned some people off. But we had business people saying, I'll never see the world again the same way. I will never see my role in the world again the same way. But what I took away from it is that, and this wouldn't have been possible 10 years ago, and I think it wouldn't have been possible pre pandemic. But there is a exploding hunger out there within the mainstream. And so even though a big bad company may seem like a big, you know, monolith that's unchangeable and unmovable and unsteerable. There are people within these organizations that are hurting and hungry for reconnecting with their own humanity. And so I've, I've gone from, you know, I'll say this sort of a bit crassly. I don't really care if Walmart and Nestle become a regenerative company. I have my doubts whether they ever can be. I'll say it nicely. But I know I now know firsthand there are people inside those organizations who are very keen to be part of this story. Let me say one more thing here is it's really important to me that we shift the onus of proof or the onus of justification from the 20th century norm, which was business as usual sitting back in its big chair saying, you know, bring me an ecological design or a biomimetic design or a socially, socially just product. If you can show me that it meets the bottom line, if you've got a good business case for it, then I'm interested if you haven't come back when you're ready, come back when you're ready with a good business case. And it's it's just so time to flip the onus and say, no, we stand here. We stand in a space of what we what we best know is true and alive. We stand here with the principles that we're beginning to feel and sense this is what it means the system that works. Now you have the onus to approach and bring your enterprise design and your enterprise goals and its ways of working and explain why it does or it may not belong in the future. And not all enterprises will be able to make it not not all of them will belong. So to me, this is a really critical moment where we shift that norm and I want to be part of a team that says, come on, let's together. And is it how we hold ourselves? Is it the language we speak? Is it the framing? Is it how do we do this more and faster? Because I think there's a really important shift just in the same way that many universities, you know, they're all invested in fossil fuels and it will come on us. This is our investments. I mean, don't be silly. We're not actually going to muck around with our investments and then it swept across the US just actually the moral norm totally shifted overnight. You've got to get out. I couldn't agree more Kate. I love the standing firm on the proverbial show me the sustainability case. Show me the business case for sustainability. And my response to that is, sir, show me the sustainability case for your business. And if you can't make it, then why are you in business? But the hard reality is that that raises a series of changes and disruptions and turmoil and unemployment and cities not having tax bases and all kinds of challenges that, you know, I think many of us have been shy or. afraid or not having the guts to speak about, but the entire financial assets of the planet, whether it's stocks of companies, bonds of municipalities, real-state assets, they're all tax bases of all municipal entities, national entities, the UN itself. I mean, all of these institutions have a business model that's predicated on exponential material growth on the planet. And if that's not possible, and I'm pretty sure it's not, the change that we're heading toward has not been processed yet by even those of us in this space that are making these arguments. And it's kind of easy to glibbly say we need degrowth. Well, I actually am hopeful that we don't need to degrowth in aggregate. We need to degrow a lot of things. I hope that, and this is why this regenerative process to me is so important and powerful. And I believe in every bone of my body that tapping into this regenerative potential is the source of our future prosperity that will offset the massive loss of "prosperity" that is coming when we reconcile the physics of exponential growth on a finite planet. Yeah, I'm really glad you raised that point around the enormity of the transformation. And I think the thing that I see appealing to lots of people in this conversation in my regeneration is the shift in mindset from being sort of less human and doing less and being less and consuming less, which I think sustainability can feel like sometimes, and into a space of hope, a space of actually life could be better if we move in this way, the better in ways that maybe are different to the ways that we're currently measuring it. But at the same time, it doesn't diminish the enormity of that transformation. And we're seeing this now in the flickering of the current economy with the increase in inflation and the cost of living crisis. And that's really biting for a lot of people. Do you have any reflections on how we can manage that transition and support people through this process? And I think for me, so in the context of the UK, where I see the cost of living crisis most strongly, it's, well, it's a desecrated space in the sense, I think that the political and social situation we have in the UK means we end up in a cost of living crisis that is the product of the social structures and ownership structures and the divisive society that's been created here as a system for many, many decades. And it's a result of what we've been creating. It's a result of the degenerative system we've been creating, but it's also a result of the deeply divisive social structures. And they're in the same way that when the COVID pandemic hit, there were so many things that government stepped in and did that were off the table beforehand. And there were so many things governments could step in and do that they somehow here now managed to say off the table in the UK a month or two ago, there was a question, should we have a windfall tax on the super normal profits of fossil fuel companies? The government completely dismissed it. No, no, no, no, no, no, that would discourage investment. And now it's coming round and actually this is likely to happen. And it's just being designed. But these things are totally possible, but they are politically seen to be off the table. And if we want to ensure that everybody can afford their energy, can afford their food, there are so many different ways of organizing our society, but they've been marginalised as political possibilities because, and I'm speaking particularly for the UK, because of the political culture that's been developed here in the dominance of a government that just won't even count on its there's policy. So I think we create these cost of living crises. And we are the results of the decisions we are willing or not willing to take. Well, said I mean, you know, and again, it's a reminder of the importance as Dana Metos taught us of of shifting the paradigm because the over to the window needs to move radically if we're to manage this transformation with the least amount of pain possible. And there's already massive pain. It's nice for us all sitting here on our Zoom calls and our comfort of our home, but there's massive pain obviously everywhere. General Eisenhower was once asked a question, sir, what do you do if you can't solve a problem or something like that and said, oh, that's easy, make the problem bigger. And I think we need to make the problem bigger. We do not have the institutions we need today to manage a donut economy. And the work of Peter Barnes here is I think really important. People have estimated that the co-inherited wealth, which is everything from the air we breathe, the quote unquote ecosystem services that the forest provide, but also the cumulative technological progress of humanity. There's a reason why people can profit by speculating in stock flow day, which is because they were born in a world where there is massive technology and they're able them to do that. And they choose to do that and pay no rent for the right to do that. And what if we view the stock markets as a commons, just like we view the rainforest as a commons? And what if we set up an institution to manage it in the interest of the seventh generation or the seventh-teeth generation, just like we should set up an institution to manage the rainforest and manage the atmosphere? That commons institution is missing in our current system design. We have the public sector in the private sector and the nonprofit sector. But in reality, people have monetary value on the commons sector. The commons sector is at least 80% of the total economy. In other words, the privately owned wealth, the inherited wealth, the wealth that gets inherited is only 20% of the total. And yet we think we can manage within the doughnut without bringing the 80% into the system to protect the 80%. Not to monetize it the way some people want, but to manage it so that it's protected. And that will generate massive revenues if people pay rent to use the commons. And if the commons management institutions have the authority to set quotas, just like we do for fisheries, so that we can abuse them. And that is the source of a guaranteed income, a minimum income, whatever it is, we want to call it, that will make the massive people that today can't afford standard living, it's because they've been cut off from their inheritance is the way I like to think of it. But we have to think bigger. We're not going to manage our way through this by fixing the current public companies and by fixing public policies in a broken public sector. We're going to need to think bigger and get to work on that with haste. And if I knew how to do that, I'd be working on it already. If covered, there seems to be a need for fundamental changes in the political system, in the system of governance, in the system of ownership. And in the legal structures, both for institutions and in the wider sense, like you were just describing, but also for companies. Where do we see any examples of people actually trying to navigate this deadlock between, we're still set within a global economy that has a zero-sum game, win-lose core pattern. The structure that has been set up drives the behavior of the actors within it. But we need to start somewhere. And with regard to, for example, ownership structures, land trusts, or with regard to company structures that fastest growing enterprise form our cooperatives, which at least share the economic benefits of their activity among the owners. But if they come back to the original sense of cooperatives, they would also include the kind of values that you were speaking to earlier, within living systems values. Do you see any examples, like when you run action labs in different places, or when you know that you've just done the course with the Capital Institute? Are there any stories you can highlight where people are experimenting to find answers to this? I'll jump in. I think in the first course of economics that any student has taught, you can one-on-one, until now they're taught, first of all, welcome to economics here as the market of supply and demand. So we put the market at the centre of vision. That's just seen as an uncontested starting point. I think it's highly contestable. So they go the market. And then, oh, well, of course, there may be market failures and some externalities, in which case we need the state. And then you get this market state duality in this kind of ideological boxing match between the two. And I think it's crucial to open the space and say, hang on, those are two. There are at least four. There's the unpaid caring work at the household where we all come from every day, where we begin the cooking, washing, cleaning, sweeping, the raising of children, traditionally done by women, but that unpaid care that we must recognise. And there is the commons where we are stewards and volunteers and co-creators and sheriffs. And even the names of who we are in these spaces, so if we start economics with the market, then who I can be is consumer or a producer. I'm shopping or working or shopping or working. That is limiting. And the characteristics of what we are in that space of production, what they need to be reimagined. There's so much creativity that can happen in the market space. Who we are in relation to the state is public servant or voter or protester or resident. But who we are in the commons, we need these names, these words. I am a, you said it, Daniel. We are stewards. if we are. creators, what if we are shareers and just these names change us and research has shown that if we call people please fill in the citizenship survey or please fill in this consumer survey, even if they're answering the very same questions people answer them differently. If they've been told it's a concidorship or a consumer survey, so the labels, the names that we're called by change who we show up as and we need to enrich our language with this language of stewardship and co-creation and volunteering and sharing and repairing and restoring and refurbishing and the words change us. I mean Hannah Arrent said this beautiful thing that a stray dog has a much better chance of surviving if it's given a name and so I think the regenerative economy is an incredibly important name that in western culture is given to what was treated as a stray dog. Other cultures have known the dog's name from millennia but we've been, oh this dog now has a name and look at what it creates it's an aspiration people want people are drawn to it because it's beautiful and we need to continue to name and I think draw and visualize and depict and show ourselves the old oh yes I was steeped in that and show ourselves the new it can be that because what we draw in the words we use are so powerful in making the frames and in energising us and creating something that's irresistible so for me that is one of the very very key ways that we bring forth the commons just by speaking to it and pointing to it when we see it and I think that's what we're trying to do at the RSA as well like you said people are looking for new frameworks and new stories and by showing what this new story could look like we can bring people in to this wider movement. Thank you Kate and John for sharing your thoughts with us today and helping us add to that new story and thank you for listening we hope you enjoyed episode four in our seven part series Regeneration Rising please check out the show notes for links and resources and to find out more about how you can be part of the regeneration.