Financing regeneration at the scale of place
For years, many of us working in integrated landscape management have run into the same problem. A municipality or regional coalition may have climate plans, food strategies, watershed initiatives, biodiversity programs, rural development efforts, and active local organizations all moving in roughly the same direction.
And still, implementation remains fragmented.
A municipality may simultaneously be trying to support local farmers, reduce flood risk, improve school food procurement, restore biodiversity, strengthen tourism, and revitalize rural livelihoods — often through separate departments and disconnected funding streams.
The problem is often not a total absence of money. It is that territories are still financed project by project, even when the challenges themselves are deeply interconnected. Across many places, the challenge is no longer visioning. It is coordination.
The new Integrated Landscape Finance Guidelines, developed as part of the RegenerAction initiative, were written for this challenge. The publication is designed as a practical companion to the broader RegenerAction Blueprint, helping territories move from visioning and planning toward financing and implementation.
The guidance combines conceptual framing with practical tools. It walks territories through assessing finance conditions, identifying investment needs and coordination gaps, developing pipelines and finance strategies, and building the institutional functions needed to sustain implementation over time.
The guidelines build on more than two decades of work in integrated landscape management and landscape finance, including earlier methodologies such as the Landscape Investment and Finance Toolkit, finance roadmaps developed through 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People, and more recent applied work through the Landscape Finance Accelerator.
In recent years, I’ve increasingly seen municipalities, landscape partnerships, and regional coalitions grappling with versions of the same coordination challenge. As governments and institutions commit to regeneration, climate adaptation, biodiversity recovery, and rural renewal, implementation capacity at the scale of place is becoming a central issue.
The guidance is intended for municipalities, regional coalitions, landscape partnerships, biodistricts, rural development organizations, and others working to coordinate long-term regenerative transitions.
Food systems as an entry point into regeneration
One reason the RegenerAction context is such an interesting home for this work is that it approaches regeneration through food systems and the wider life of rural territories.
Led by the Future Food Institute with support from EIT Food, RegenerAction focuses on regenerative agriculture, biodiversity, climate resilience, social innovation, and community empowerment, with rural territories becoming living laboratories for regeneration and economic renewal.
The Future Food Institute’s work in Pollica, in southern Italy, is a powerful example. Closely associated with the Mediterranean Diet, Pollica has become a place for exploring how food heritage, ecological stewardship, local economies, public health, tourism, and community identity can reinforce one another within a shared development vision.
In Pollica, food is understood not only as production or consumption, but as something that links landscape, memory, ecology, health, and local identity. In this context, the Mediterranean Diet is not treated simply as a nutritional model. It becomes a way of understanding the relationship between landscape, culture, ecology, economy, and wellbeing. That is part of what makes food systems such a powerful entry point for municipal and regional leaders.
School meals, procurement, tourism, water systems, farmer livelihoods, and public health are all areas municipalities already touch in some way. Yet these issues are often managed separately, through fragmented budgets, departments, and funding streams. Landscape finance offers a way to connect these pieces into a more coherent long-term strategy.
Increasingly, municipalities and regional partnerships are being asked to coordinate transitions that existing financial and institutional systems were never really designed to support. Across many rural regions, the challenge becomes less about finding one large new source of funding and more about coordinating different forms of capital around shared priorities over time.
In practice, landscape finance is often less about inventing entirely new financial instruments than about creating the relationships and coordination structures that allow existing forms of capital to work together more effectively.
None of this is easy. Place-based coordination involves managing institutional silos, uneven capacities, conflicting incentives, and changing political realities. Regeneration unfolds over decades, while many funding systems operate in cycles of only a few years.
Regenerative transitions require institutions capable not only of funding projects, but of staying with places through long and uneven processes of change. That tension is one of the reasons landscape finance is becoming increasingly relevant.
From projects to portfolios
At the center of the guidelines is a fairly simple shift in perspective: moving from isolated projects toward coordinated portfolios.
A regenerative agriculture transition may depend on technical assistance, patient capital, buyer commitments, water management, processing infrastructure, and farmer-to-farmer learning. A watershed restoration effort may create benefits for agriculture, biodiversity, tourism, flood resilience, and municipal water systems simultaneously. The value lies not only in each investment individually, but in the relationships among them.
The publication tries to translate these systems challenges into practical questions territories can actually work with. The framework is organized around three broad areas: understanding finance needs and conditions; developing the finance infrastructure; and mobilizing and coordinating investment over time. Importantly, it is designed as a flexible pathway rather than a rigid recipe. Different places begin from different starting points. Some already have strong governance platforms but weak financial strategies. Others have promising enterprises but little coordination capacity. Some have public funding but no investment pipeline.
The guidelines are intended to help territories identify where they are, what already exists, and where coordination gaps are preventing progress. While RegenerAction is rooted in food systems, the framework applies much more broadly. The same landscape finance logic can support watershed resilience, biodiversity corridors, regenerative tourism, circular economy transitions, forest restoration, climate adaptation, or regional just transition strategies.
Food systems simply provide one particularly effective doorway into wider place-based regeneration because they connect land, livelihoods, ecology, culture, markets, and health so directly. Many of these approaches are still being invented in practice. Publications like these are also part of a broader effort to make emerging place-based finance practices more visible, shareable, and operational across different contexts.
An emerging practice
What makes this publication especially timely is that many places are already trying to navigate these transitions in practice.
Across Europe and beyond, municipalities, biodistricts, watershed partnerships, rural development organizations, and regional coalitions are experimenting with ways to connect fragmented initiatives into more coherent long-term strategies. Increasingly, they are discovering that the challenge is not only technical or financial. It is also organizational: how to coordinate actors, institutions, and different forms of capital over time.
Over time, many place-based initiatives arrive at the same realization: someone has to do the work of keeping the pieces connected. Long-term transitions require institutions capable of convening actors, aligning funding streams, supporting project preparation, and maintaining continuity through political and funding cycles.
In many ways, that may be the deeper subject of landscape finance. The field is still evolving, and many of these approaches remain experimental in practice. The hope is that these guidelines can provide a practical starting point for municipalities, regional coalitions, biodistricts, watershed partnerships, and other place-based initiatives trying to connect long-term regenerative visions with real financing and implementation pathways.
The challenge is rarely a lack of ideas or commitment. More often, it is the difficulty of connecting finance, governance, and long-term coordination in ways that allow places to move together. That is the challenge these guidelines are trying to engage — and one that an emerging landscape finance field is increasingly beginning to take seriously.
