Building economies in place: reflections from Lyon
Lyon is a city built at the confluence of two rivers — the powerful Rhône, historically difficult to navigate upstream, and the gentler Saône, flowing calmly through the old town. It was a fitting backdrop for Partners for a New Economy’s (P4NE) annual gathering — “Hope in a Time of Collapse” — which brought together 250 practitioners, funders, researchers, and activists working to reconfigure the economic systems that lie at the root of ecological destruction and social injustice.
The geography of Lyon mirrored the task before us: pushing upstream against powerful global currents, while holding space for multiple, sometimes contradictory, pathways of transformation.
The slow unravelling and the practice of hope
Two main themes emerged during the gathering. First, collapse is not a future scenario — it is already unfolding around us. This does not look like a dramatic breakdown, but rather a gradual weakening of institutions and social systems that once felt stable. Second, hope now needs to be practiced intentionally.As keynote speaker Joycelyn Longdon reminded us, “Our hope has to be active, not merely existing.”
In that spirit, P4NE’s gathering itself felt like a small act of hope — a space to resist paralysis, to remember that the story of this collapse is not yet written, and that we can still intervene through collective practice.
A conversation on bioregional economies
Within this larger frame, I had the privilege of hosting a World Café conversation on Bioregional Economies — an exploration of why place-based approaches matter and why reconnecting to place must be central to how we think about climate action and regeneration.
For me, this question of “place” is not romantic nostalgia. It is the most practical starting point we have for reimagining our economies. Place defines the boundaries of our ecological relationships — the rivers that nourish us, the soils that sustain us, and the cultural rhythms that give meaning to our work.
In our work through the Bioregional Centre of Excellence at the Jagriti Enterprise Centre – Purvanchal, we have been learning what it means to anchor economies within their ecological and cultural landscapes. We map local value chains — food, crafts, biomaterials, waste — and rebuild them around regeneration and circularity. This is not about going backward. It’s about building forward with memory and context.
Witnessing the disconnect
It was both fascinating and unsettling to see how deeply disconnected many participants from the Global North felt from their own ecology. When I asked them to name one economic activity in their region that truly aligns with local ecology, most struggled. Broccoli from one country, cucumbers from another — everyday examples that showed how far we’ve drifted from the rhythms of the land.
The faith in the land itself seems to have faded under the weight of globalisation. The lived memory of culture and tradition in sync with nature feels distant. In the Global South, that connection still survives — fragile, yet alive. People still remember when to let soil rest, when rivers flood, when birds migrate. These are not data points; they are social knowledge systems formed by generations of coexistence.
This contrast was not about deficiency, but about what remains visible — and what has been forgotten.
Power, politics, and the how of change
A recurring theme across the gathering was power — how we engage with it, and how transformation actually happens. As one participant put it, “We have to stop bringing data to a meaning-making fight.”
For years, the new economy movement has been strong on diagnosing why the system doesn’t work, and visionary about what to replace it with. But the how — the process of transformation — remains messy, fragmented, and political. Spaces like P4NE’s gathering help bridge these gaps, reminding us that systems change cannot be technocratic or apolitical. It is about power, culture, and narrative as much as policy or models.
In that context, the bioregional economy is not a localist experiment — it is a political project to reclaim economic agency, to reconnect people to their commons, and to rebuild meaning in place.
A sceptically hopeful movement
One participant described the energy in Lyon as “different” — more hopeful, more grounded than in most climate gatherings. That energy, I think, comes from the systemic character of this work. We are not naïve about collapse; we simply refuse to believe that change is confined to the margins of the old economy.
This is what makes the new economy movement sceptically hopeful: it is realism with agency. Hospicing the old world feels less dramatic when we’ve already begun building the new one.
As I stood by the Saône on the final evening, the river seemed to hold all the conversations that had flowed through the gathering — about collapse, power, hope, and belonging.
The future of the economy, I believe, will be bioregional — not because it’s fashionable, but because it’s inevitable. When global systems unravel, place remains. And in that place, if we listen closely enough, hope still flows.
By- Sujay Hammannavar