Home Economics: Planting the Seeds of a Research Agenda for the Bioregional Economy

Abstract

In a world of climate change and declining oil supplies what is the plan for the provisioning of basic resources? Green economists suggest a need to replace the globalized economy, and its extended supply chains, with a more local economy (Hines, 2000). But what does this mean in more concrete terms? How large is a local economy, how self-reliant can it be, and what resources will still need to be imported? This paper proposes the concept of the ‘bio region’ — developed and popularized within the disciplines of earth sciences, bio sciences and planning — as a heuristic device to facilitate the reconceptualisation of the global economy as a system of largely self-sufficient local economies.