Regenerative Systems Science

When systems come under pressure, the question is not whether they change, but who bears the cost. Communities worldwide face institutional architectures that were designed for stability but produce fragility: governance structures that fragment what belongs together, financial regimes that lock in what should transform, and project logics that dissolve what needs time to grow.

CCER's regenerative systems research starts from a simple diagnostic question: what keeps a community viable, and what compresses its room for manoeuvre? Drawing on viability theory and complexity science, we develop frameworks that make visible where structural pressure accumulates, how burdens are displaced, and what kinds of infrastructure allow communities to hold together under conditions that were not designed for them.

Our empirical work is rooted in the Dutch Peel region, where agricultural transitions, ecological boundaries, and youth-led social enterprise intersect. From this base, the research extends across sustainability transitions, political economy, citizen science, and peacebuilding.

We do not prescribe what communities should become. We diagnose what prevents them from becoming what they already have the capacity to be.

Recent work