Infrastructure of the Economic System: A Complexity Lens

Panel Discussion : Alternative Understandings of Money

The huge impact that Western economic activity has on Earth as a living-system is by now well understood. The Anthropocene is recognised as a geological era unravelling the Holocene stability, and its emergence is linked to “the great acceleration”, i.e. the impacts of capitalist industrialisation visualised through hockey stick-shaped statistics of socio-economic acceleration as well as planetary depletion. 

What is less well understood, however, is the part money has played in the creation of those hockey sticks. Global finance is a highly powerful subsystem that justifies the extraction of life at exponential rates, and its current complexity leaves most actors – including politicians, academics, and even systems thinkers – incapable of questioning its role in the destruction of the living ecosystem. Even sustainable economic proposals seldom move beyond ‘adding on’ ecological and social parameters to the profit-seeking goal, keeping them stuck in the quagmire of double binds and trade-offs.

This event will explore the emergence of more radical alternatives, proposed by communities that recognise money as a social construct they can govern as a commons & for the common good. They resist the extractive design of bank money and explore alternative ways to direct money flows towards regenerative goals. This is no longer marginal, as Scotland and France are now developing national legislation to support the transition to these alternatives.

(Images below provided by Anne Snick under the Creative Commons BY-SA-NC license.)

Who Is This Event For ?

You don’t have to be a finance expert to participate! At the end of the session, you should :

• Have an understanding of where the extractive bias of current money comes from (by playing The Money Game)

• Get to know an emerging framework based on the countless steps  communities take to reorient money from extractive to regenerative goals

• Learn about the way this translates into specific legislation at the national level

• Understand what regenerative money means for investors 

This event is a Co-Occurring Symposium at the Conference on Complex Systems 2026.