‘This is a wonderful book that should be on the desk of every architect and planner. It shows how

What sort of analyses would inform these kinds of choices?
We need to look directly at resource flows (erosion, energy, soil nutrients, farmers leaving the land, 
etc) and the institutional and physical systems designs that result in wealth transfers. Otherwise, 
we will not design policies and eco-solutions that reverse these flows, let alone create net ecological 
gain. Bioregional planning analyses therefore need to examine environmental flows and resource 
transfers on a deeper level. Using water as an example, research to support a bioregional approach 
might include a mapping of several kinds of system ‘design failure’. For example: 
•
Physical design failure
: Map changes that have occurred in the hydrological system due to 
technology (pipes and dams) or planning (land-use change), using ecological transformation 
(ET) analysis.
• 
Market failure
: Map negative linear and inequitable wealth transfers of past interventions
between and within bioregions, using resource transfer (RT) analysis.
• 
Legislative failure
: Map water rights transfers that have caused waste or reductions in
environmental flows that have resulted from resource allocation and consumption systems
(eg water rights legislation) using institutional design (ID) analysis.
• 
Management failure
: Examine ‘unjust enrichment’, or benefits accrued from transfers of
natural to financial capital that are disproportionate to their contribution to the community,
using cost of inaction (CI) analysis. 
Currently, we do not compare the eco-effectiveness of industrialized system of dams and pipes to 
hi-tech (eg efficient irrigation) or low-tech (eg ‘natural sequence farming’) alternatives in terms of 
losses of health, choice, security, ecology and opportunity (ie past cumulative impacts).
Why doesn’t planning put alternatives on a level playing field already? 
We do not have a planning 
arena
where we can debate the best investment options for improving 
whole systems health [Chapter 13]. Investment usually comes from private commercial interests – or 
pressure from them for public investment. Public funds are later used to clean up the environmental 
messes that some enterprises have left behind.
50
We have seen that positive design solutions do 
not require a quantification of synergies and symbioses if an investment will pay for itself. But 
currently there is no forum for deciding the best investments to improve systems conditions – whether 
sourced from the private or public sector or partnerships. Planning seems to be stuck in negative 
debates over the amount of negative externalities that should be allowed from activities like coal-fired 
electricity generation, new green field suburbs and road building in wilderness areas. (Nor do we 
have ‘glocal’ debates about investing in peacemaking instead of military ‘solutions’, an omission that 
may nullify the utility of all planning). In short, bioregional planning inventories do not identify 
ongoing flows embedded in the status quo, the costs of inaction, or means to invent, prioritize, design 
and implement proposals for direct positive action. Hence a central function of planning should 
be to identify priority areas for eco-innovation and eco-retrofitting [Chapter 14]. We sometimes 
evaluate programmes according to triple-bottom-line frameworks, but priorities are determined by 
interest group politics.

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Positive Development