Most place planning starts from a position of control and certainty. A living system is characterised by interdependence, feedback, emergence, and the capacity to self-organise. Incorporating living systems thinking in place planning means designing for relationships rather than outputs.

Flinders Island is the largest island in the Furneaux Group in the eastern Bass Strait, off the northeast tip of Tasmania. It is remote, strikingly beautiful, and like many small islands or othe remote communities, it has historically been treated as a place that 'needs help'. It's a place where solutions get 'done' to the community rather than developed with it. It's a place to be fixed, developed, or rescued by people who fly in, make recommendations, and fly out again. Af

What does a shift to regenerative development actually mean for the policies and governance structures that shape tourism? This post explores the transitions needed, the barriers in the way, and where to begin.

Many island economies are among the most tourism-dependent in the world. For some, visitor expenditure accounts for more than seventy percent of economic activity. This is not by accident. Decades of development strategy, infrastructure investment, and international promotion have shaped island economies around the proposition that tourism is both the engine and the answer. But the proposition has a problem. Islands built around tourism are not just economically exposed, they

Island Thinking There is a pattern in how we approach environmental and social complexity. We convene experts. We commission reports. We develop frameworks, toolkits, indicators and global targets. We simplify the challenges, develop abstract solutions, and then we wonder why the results fall short of what the problems demand. On Islands, this work is often done by the development sector, funded through aid agencies and international consultants. Working with the Local 2030 N

Between July 2025 and March 2026, Place Ecologies worked with Gulf Savannah Development and 14 tourism operators across Far North West Queensland to document the resilience, adaptation and lived experience of the region's tourism sector. What emerged was not a set of best practice recommendations or policy prescriptions. It was something more useful: a portrait of how people actually build and sustain businesses in one of Australia's most demanding environments. The full stor

After writing the three posts in this series, a fourth came to me as I was walking the land. It wasn't part of the plan, but it's a thought that keeps circulating in conversations lately, and it's being perpetuated by an image: a group of happy people wearing gardening gloves and holding shovels. Or perhaps it's a beach clean up, or a shoreline rehab project. It looks like regenerative tourism, but it's not necessarily so. The glove and shovel Lately I have seen quite a few i

In the post, Introduction to Regenerative Tourism, we asked "How can tourism contribute to this place, its community, and to our well-being?" It's a different question to the one most of us asking: it invites us to redesign tourism from an extractive to a regenerative system. This question contrasts with the one we often hear in social media, which is "How do we grow tourism by giving visitors a regenerative experience?" In this second question we are simply framing regenerat

Starting a regenerative tourism journey isn't about finding the right framework — it's about learning to read the place you're already in. This post starts with the soil beneath our feet on Flinders Island and works outward to four first steps that work almost anywhere.

It is occasionally useful to take stock and acknowledge that we are all at different stages in our regenerative learning journey. As our understandings continue to grow and be refined, do we double back and renew our explanations, updating them for nuances and new insights? In this post, I would like to introduce regenerative tourism once again, adding additional insights to the earlier posts in this blog space. What is regenerative tourism? Regenerative tourism is a term tha