Our Regenerative Practice
The Ten Pillars of Regenerative Practice is a systems based approach developed by Dianne Dredge and is the canonical reference for regenerative practice in place-based economic-community development.
Ten Pillars of Regenerative Practice
Regeneration is not a marketing term. It is not the next step on a sustainability ladder or an overlap on an eco-label. It is a fundamentally different way of understanding how to work with places. It started out as a way of building resilience in touristed places, but we have found it has broad applicability. It's how to work with and relate to places and communities to enhance resilience, vibrancy, and connection in a changing world.
These Ten Pillars of practice were not developed as a top down framework based on observing and categorising research. It emerged from a bottom up reflection on 30 years of embedded, embodied community practice. It was developed to give practitioners, policymakers and communities a rigorous basis for distinguishing genuine regenerative practice from greenwashing, and for designing and evaluating the work that is required to steward healthy living systems.
The framework is grounded in living systems thinking: the recognition that places — their ecologies, cultures, economies and communities — are complex, adaptive systems, not products to be optimised. Genuinely regenerative approaches work with those systems rather than against them.
Regenerative Economies
Value can be created differently. This pillar encourages diverse business models, local value exchange and economic activity that circulates wealth within a place rather than extracting it, asking how visitor economies can strengthen local ecosystems and distribute benefit more equitably.
The practice
These are not sequential steps. They are not a checklist. There is no point at which you complete one pillar and move to the next, no certification at the end, no graduation. No boxes to tick.
This is work in systems. In a living system, every part affects every other part — you cannot fix the ecology without attending to the community, cannot strengthen the community without attending to governance, cannot change governance without shifting the economic relationships that lock-in the current model.
The four areas of our work reflect this. Research, practice, community and immersive experience are themselves a system: each one makes the others more possible, each one is changed by the others. They are also never finished. Like the places they attend to, they are always in process: emergent, responsive, and shaped by what the work reveals.
What this means in practice: we do not offer a program that runs from A to B. We offer sustained engagement with the questions that matter, in the places where they arise, with the people who have to live with the answers.
Inner Work
Regenerative practice begins within ourselves. Before we can shift systems, we have to shift ourselves: examining how we think, what assumptions we carry, and what still holds us in old extractive patterns. Inner work deepens out conscious awareness and makes our actions intentional and our values visible in practice.
Hosting Good Conversations
Change happens in conversation. This pillar builds the skills of deep listening, empathy and holding space for complexity: sitting with divergent perspectives, resisting the urge to diagnose too early, and creating the conditions for genuine co-design to emerge.
Holistic Knowledge
We know more than we think we know. This pillar draws on the full range of human intelligence, cognitive, emotional, somatic, cultural and indigenous, and asks us to move beyond the dominance of the scientific paradigm. Knowledge lives in many forms and many bodies, not just the ones we have been trained to trust.
Include nature
Nature is not a backdrop. It is a stakeholder, a teacher and a rights holder, and this pillar asks us to include it in every conversation, learning from its patterns rather than simply extracting from them. The question shifts from what we can take to what we can give back.
Place Design
Place has its own rhythms, memory and character. This pillar deepens our understanding of the ecological, social and cultural dimensions of a place, and builds communities of practice that let local knowledge flourish. It asks whether our work is strengthening a place's sense of itself, or eroding it.
Identity, Belonging and Stewardship
Regenerative development works at the level of belonging. This pillar honours the felt experience of place, nurtures the relationship between hosts and guests, and supports the leaders already catalysing change from within. Stewardship is both a responsibility and a gift.
Systems Work
Complex problems cannot be solved with fragmented thinking. This pillar dissolves the boundaries between disciplines, sectors and organisations, paying attention to how resources, information and energy actually flow through a system, because when one part is depleted, every part feels it.
Learning Journeys
Living systems are constantly learning, adapting and optimising for survival, and this pillar cultivates that same reflective practice in us: experimenting, gathering place based insights, and learning together without judgement. These journeys are not linear. They are iterative, collective and ongoing.
Impact and Adaptation
Regenerative practice requires accountability. This pillar tracks whether our activity is genuinely moving toward regeneration, and builds the capacity to adapt when it is not, nurturing the open dialogue, participatory decision making and governance conditions that let communities shape the places they call home.
A Note on Scale
In the dominant model, scale means adoption: how many organisations have implemented the framework, how many downloads, how many certified practitioners. That model treats knowledge as a product to be distributed and success as a number. It's business-as-usual where the motivation is to sell the product. Any ecological improvement is a secondary outcome.
In living systems work, scale moves differently. It moves through learning and connection, and through the practitioner who works and learns with a community, say on Flinders Island, and takes something back to their own context and applies it, that's scaling. Through the conversations at annual gatherings that shifts how someone thinks about their work, through the slow evolution of practice as people apply ideas in real conditions and discover what holds and what does not, that's scaling at the pace of place.
This kind of scale cannot be counted, but it changes things more durably than any framework or checklist ever could. It also relies on human connection, listening, and collaboration, which build resilience and local 'know-how'. This kind of scaling removes reliance on fickle, short-term funding cycles because the knowledge and practice generated rests with people in place, not consultants with access to funding who move on and take the funding with them.
The Islander Way — Flinders Island, Tasmania
A multi-year community-led regenerative tourism living lab on Flinders Island. The project asked: how might tourism contribute to a flourishing community, place, and environment? The result was a regenerative hosting framework adopted by the local council.
Gulf Savannah — Remote Queensland
Read the case study
Working with operators and communities in another of Australia's most remote and ecologically distinctive landscapes to tell their stories of floods, economic and social resilience through genuine connection to community and Country.
Local 2030 Islands Network — Global Scaling
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A global network scaling regenerative thinking across island communities — celebrating island knowledge systems, Indigenous wisdom, and islands as leaders of genuinely different development models. Hawaii became the first jurisdiction to pass a regenerative development bill.
Up the Creek — Naam/Melbourne
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A regenerative business coaching case study. Up the Creek is a nature-based river experience founded on a different way to grow: by letting go of extraction-minded business logic and learning to work with the river as a partner, not a setting. Transformation unfolded.
Case Studies
The Pillars in Practice
These are not hypothetical examples or curated best practices sourced from elsewhere. They are projects we have been part of, and in some cases led. In other cases, we contributed to, over years and in real conditions. The work was difficult, non-linear, and occasionally uncomfortable. That is what genuine systems change looks like.
Each case study or work is linked to the Ten Pillars of Regenerative Tourism framework and documents not just what happened, but what we learned about how change actually moves through places and communities.
Our Story
Related Insights
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Responsible vs Regenerative: Why the Distinction Matters
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Incorporating Living Systems Thinking in Place Planning
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Greenwashing, Co-optation and the Limits of Certification
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When the World Order Shifts, Can Tourism Stay the Same?
Citing the 10 Pillars
Dredge, D. (2021). The Ten Pillars of Regenerative Tourism. Place Ecologies / The Tourism CoLab. Updated 2026.
Retrieved from placeecologies.com/regenerative-tourism-framework