Regenerative Governance: Ethical Innovation and Business Models for Systemic Change

Food and agriculture face interlinked crises of biodiversity loss, climate change and inequity,exposing the fragility of extractive models (IPBES, 2019; IPBES, 2025). This paper develops aframework of regenerative governance, combining Meadows’ leverage points, Ostrom’scommons, and post-growth ethics, to analyze enterprises as micro-governance experiments insustainability transitions. Using four cases, a US family farm, Dutch start-up, UK cooperative,and an Ecuadorian cacao partnership, we examine how organizational forms intervene atsystemic levels by redesigning rules, feedbacks, and paradigms.Cross-case analysis shows that family and partnership models often catalyze paradigm shifts,while cooperatives and entrepreneurial networks codify rules and incentives at scale. Together,they illustrate regenerative enterprises as “living laboratories” of ethical innovation, embeddingfairness, stewardship, and resilience into governance. The paper contributes by: (1) integratingsystems, commons, and post-growth theory into an operational governance lens; (2)demonstrating how organizational forms activate distinct leverage points; and (3) advancingpractice-oriented propositions for testing regenerative governance in food systems. Bypositioning regenerative enterprises as governance innovations, the paper reframes businessstrategy not only as value creation but as systemic intervention, with implications for sustainablebusiness models. The findings suggest that small, place-based initiatives can prefigure systemictransitions when nested in polycentric networks and supported by aligned incentives, pointing topathways for post-growth transformation.