Governing regenerative development

Given rapid and hard to predict social, technological, and environmental change, developing an effective governance mechanism is a major challenge for the project of regenerative development. I argue that the body of work around deliberative governance, and especially analytic deliberative approaches to adaptive risk governance, can provide a mode of governance consistent with the ideal of regenerative development. I suggest that such deliberative governance processes need to be seeded with consideration of at least eight key questions that present special challenges and opportunities. This chapter considers the nature of the governance problem in regenerative development, invoking the literature on analytic deliberative processes for adaptive risk governance. The discourse on sustainability emerged in the late 20th century in response to concerns about the effects of global transformations on human well-being and the environment, including the well-being of other species. The modern discourse of sustainability can reasonably be traced to the confluence of several concerns that emerged in large part from settler colonialism. In addition to the spatial challenge of balancing the local and the global, governance of regenerative development involves a temporal challenge. Global environmental change moots any simple notion of preservation even in protected areas. Regenerative development requires decisions not only about how to design systems but also about the goals for those systems. Regenerative development projects can build on a substantial body of experience and literature in designing processes that link diverse forms of expertise with public deliberation.