The Field That Does Not Yet Know It Is a Field

If a careful researcher mapped the work currently being done that the previous chapters have been pointing toward, what they would find is not a coordinated movement. They would find dozens of distinct lineages, mostly unaware of each other, working in adjacent design spaces with overlapping vocabularies and very limited coordination.

In one cluster, the regenerative-coordination world has been building infrastructure for what its participants describe variously as commons-based coordination, regenerative finance, bioregional governance, and post-extractive economic experimentation. OpenCivics has been running a Network Coordination Commons since 2024, convening network coordinators across civic innovation projects to share what they have learned about how networks actually work. The Capital Institute’s Regenerative Communities Network connects place-based regenerative initiatives across multiple continents. ReFi DAO coordinates communities working on regenerative finance using cryptographic infrastructure. The Funding the Commons gatherings, the Crypto Commons Gathering in Europe, the Earth Regeneration Alliance, and a growing constellation of bioregional networks each represent a different angle on the same underlying question: how can value circulate among aligned actors without being captured by extractive incentives?

In another cluster, what could be called the inner-development world has been building a parallel infrastructure for the physiological and contemplative substrate the diagnostic chapters described. The Inner Development Goals framework, established by a Swedish nonprofit in 2020 and now integrated into curricula, leadership programs, and policy frameworks across multiple countries, articulates a structured language for the inner capacities sustainable transformation requires. The Contemplative Sustainable Futures Program at Lund University, the Mind & Life Institute, the Garrison Institute, the Initiative for Contemplation, Equity and Action—each is working at a different layer of the question of how human beings develop the capacities that complex civilization actually depends on. The 2025 IDG Summit gathered researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from over fifty countries to share what is being learned about how inner development catalyzes outer change.

These two worlds rarely overlap. The regenerative-coordination world tends to be technologically literate, oriented toward design and finance, often skeptical of what reads as soft. The inner-development world tends to be relationally literate, oriented toward practice and psychology, often skeptical of what reads as extractive. Each has something the other needs. Both are working on what is recognizably the same civilizational problem from different sides.

A third cluster, broader and more diffuse, includes work the book has already named: AI alignment research, deliberation platforms like Pol.is and vTaiwan, regenerative agriculture practitioners, Indigenous-led conservation initiatives, ecological restoration networks, restorative justice systems, mutual credit experiments like Sardex and cooperative federations like Mondragón. Each of these is doing work the others depend on, and most are operating in relative isolation from the rest.

This is what the book has been describing as the unfinished field. The work exists. The people doing it exist. What does not yet exist is the coordination infrastructure that would let them find each other at the density the present moment requires.