By Dr. Demeter, Magical Farm Tasmania
For nearly 20 years, I’ve sat in fluorescent-lit rooms, usually across from a middle manager, clipboard in hand, who looks me in the eye and asks: What’s your business model?
The question appears benign. But when applied to regenerative community projects, like social gardens, food prescriptions with regenerative produce, food hubs, harvest festivals, and healing gardens, it reveals more than it asks. Behind it is an ideology that says value must be extractable, quantified, and packaged for reporting.
After decades of designing alongside, within, and around local government, both as a community builder and policy writer, I now feel it’s time to turn the question around: What is your business model, local government?
Because from where I sit, too often the business of governance has become a business of performance. Schemes are launched in Canberra, handed to state policy units, filtered into local strategy, and finally passed to consultants who produce reports. Somewhere in that long chain, the actual work of regeneration is lost.
But it doesn’t have to be.
The Machinery of Abstraction
Australia has 566 Local Government Areas (LGAs). In theory, these should be the closest and most responsive tier of government. In practice, they are often the most entangled in layers of policy choreography.
Let us say there is a new federal scheme focused on "resilience." It originates in Canberra, crafted with national objectives. This is then dispatched to state-level policy officers, who produce frameworks, templates, and research documents. These are then sent to the local government, where internal staff and external consultants are engaged to translate these frameworks into engagement strategies and planning briefs.
In this process, consultants are hired, community sessions are held, reports are produced, and graphics are designed. Yet rarely is meaningful funding directed toward the tangible outcomes that the policy itself claims to support. The idea becomes commodified, its meaning diluted through layers of abstraction.
Drawing on the work of theorists such as Guy Debord, Ivan Illich, and Henri Lefebvre, we can see this clearly:
Debord reminds us that governance has become spectacle: a theatre of documents, dashboards, and launch events.
Illich critiques the institutionalisation of care and life, naming how tools meant to serve living systems become means of control.
Lefebvre speaks of "abstract space," where lived reality is erased by grids and schedules.
This is not a crisis of bad intention, it is a structural condition. But conditions can be composted. And that is what I’ve spent the past decade doing, and through Regen Era Design plan to do further composting work.
A Tactic of Integrity: Redirection of the Brief
Twelve years ago, I began applying a concept I learned from Tony Fry: Redirection of the Brief. It means strategically redirecting the purpose of a project or policy, not to subvert it, but to realign it with life.
One example is the Huon Valley Food Hub. The original budget allocated around $70,000 for community engagement and only $10,000 for on-ground outcomes. I flipped that model. We ran engagement and co-design in-house, and redirected the funds toward community activation.
With the $70,000, we delivered:
Ten farm gate blitzes across the valley
A regenerative food prescription program for twelve families
A First Nations garden activation at Sacred Heart College
The "Growing Together" Harvest Festival featuring four seasonal dinners, markets, and seed library installations
This was not just a tactical shift, it was a philosophical one. From consultation to participation. From paper to practice. From performance to presence.
Deep Roots: Rethinking Governance from the Soil Up
Helena Norberg-Hodge has long critiqued the impacts of global trade and centralised systems. She shows how even local governments, under pressure to "perform," replicate corporate metrics and market-based models. The result is a hollowing out of public life. Seed libraries become KPIs. Community gardens become pilot programs. Festivals become outputs. But the living relationships that sustain a place? These are rarely recognised, let alone funded.
We need a shift in governance: not toward more management, but toward regenerative participation. We need a life systems worldview that sees communities not as service recipients, but as co-creators. This means investing in what is slow, rooted, and relational. It means resourcing the invisible infrastructure of care, trust, and local knowledge.
A New Brief for the Public Good
The word "brief" once meant a letter of trust, an invitation to act on behalf of something larger than oneself. What if we reclaimed that meaning? What if the next time we crafted a policy brief, it was not a checklist but a compost heap rich with complexity, local flavour, and the wisdom of those who live it?
So I ask again:
What is your business model, local government?
Because mine is this:
Care for place, people and planet.
Participation that grows roots, not paperwork.
Regeneration that feeds both soil and soul.
Local nutrient dence food supplied to schools and those who really need it.
And that, to me, is not just a business model. It is a way of life. Because ultimately, taxpayer funds are meant for the public good. Whether or not a project fits a conventional profit model, public funding should serve people, place, and planet not just generate documents and paperwork.
In future writing, I will offer more 'scenarios' for how local government might evolve toward regenerative practice. But first, we must begin the composting process, naming what no longer serves, and imagining what might grow in its place. And that starts by being clear about what the problem really is. Because ultimately, taxpayer funds are meant for the public good. Whether or not a project fits a conventional profit model, public funding should serve people, place, and planet not just generate documents and paperwork.
If local governments changed their business model even slightly to reflect this, our entire society would begin to shift. We would see the emergence of a new kind of public service: one rooted in care, participation, and tangible outcomes. This would mean a workforce skilled not only in administration, but in co-design and place-based activation design.
It would also mean that policy schemes must begin with ground-up knowledge not the siloed abstractions of policy wonk worlds, but the lived wisdom of those who know the land, know the people, and know what actually works.