Money and finance shape how resources, risks, and opportunities flow through the world. Yet today’s financial systems often deepen inequality, harm nature, and reward short-term gain over long-term wellbeing. In this subtopic, you explore how money and finance can be redesigned to support people and the planet.
You begin by asking three guiding questions:
Who has access to finance?
What goals are being financed?
And what rules shape financial relationships?
These questions show how existing systems favour the already wealthy and how changing them could promote inclusion, care, and regeneration.
You then explore how regenerative finance works at different scales. Large institutional investors, such as pension and insurance funds, can shift vast resources toward life-supporting goals when their priorities and responsibilities change. Local strategies like community banks, savings groups, and alternative currencies keep value circulating within communities. At national level, states can guide credit and investment through public banks, mission-led finance, and credit policies that direct money to social and ecological goals. You also consider how governments finance themselves, and how tools such as central bank digital currencies could support inclusion and stability if designed with care. At global level, new tools such as debt-for-nature swaps and innovative climate finance, together with fairer rules on taxation and cooperation, can align financial systems with human and ecological wellbeing.
Throughout this subtopic, you will see that financial systems are designed by people, which means they can be redesigned. Regenerative finance invites us to align money with life, circulating it fairly, governing it together, and directing it toward a thriving planet and just societies.
At the end of Subtopic 6.3 you should be able to:
outline why finance needs redesigning, addressing the questions of who has access to finance, what goals are being financed and what rules shape financing
describe the role of institutional investors in the financial system
explain some ways that institutional investing could be redesigned to be more regenerative
explain the importance of local community finance strategies for supporting social and ecological regeneration, with examples of different types of organisations
outline some challenges faced by local, community finance
outline the key decisions that need to be made about currency design to achieve a particular goal
discuss how states can direct the flow of finance toward regenerative goals through public banks, credit guidance and blended finance and the challenges they face in doing so
discuss how states can finance regenerative activities through taxation, borrowing, and money creation
discuss the functions and potential risks of a central bank digital currency (CBDC)
discuss how global financial tools are being redesigned to support regenerative social and ecological goals
discuss how global financial rules are being redesigned to support regenerative social and ecological goals