systemic transition - TOWARDS LIFE-KNOWLEDGE

This white paper offers a paradigm-shifting critique of the global sustainability industry through the evaluative and philosophical lens of Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA). It argues that the prevailing sustainability regime, despite its aspirational rhetoric, is structurally embedded in colonial, extractive, and technocratic systems that continue to disable life capacities across ecological, cultural, and political domains.

Building on the groundbreaking analysis in Colonial Sustainability (Sayson et al., 2024) and practitioner reflections such as Bjørkskov’s We Can’t Manage Decline and Call It Justice, the paper diagnoses five domains of systemic life-incoherence — ecological, economic, cultural, technocratic, and political. It then articulates a life-coherent alternative rooted in LVOA, including principles for regenerative design, bioregional governance, communal sovereignty, and systems transformation.

This is not a reformist proposal but a life-centered civilizational pivot: from greenwashed empire to biocultural regeneration. It calls for the hospicing of dominant sustainability paradigms and the seeding of coherent futures grounded in reciprocity, responsibility, and relational repair.

From Locke to Life: A Manifesto for Regenerative Governance offers a comprehensive critique and reconstitution of the philosophical foundations of modern political economy. Tracing the legacy of John Locke’s social contract, property theory, and liberal individualism, the book exposes how these once-liberatory ideas have come to underwrite systemic ecological degradation, structural inequality, and political illegitimacy in the contemporary era.

In response, the text advances a new onto-axiological framework — Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA) — which grounds legitimacy, rights, value, and governance in the universal requirements of life itself. Rejecting abstractions such as GDP, market price, and procedural consent as sufficient evaluative criteria, the manifesto centers life coherence — the capacity of systems to sustain, develop, and regenerate shared life conditions — as the ultimate standard of assessment.

Through rigorous philosophical analysis and systemic synthesis, the book redefines key political concepts: rights become entitlements to life goods; property becomes stewardship; freedom becomes enabled agency; and government becomes a steward of regenerative provisioning rather than an enforcer of possessive individualism. It offers a roadmap for civilizational transition through institutional redesign, cultural transformation, and the reconstruction of a life-grounded social contract.

Intended for scholars, policymakers, and regenerative practitioners, From Locke to Life articulates both a critique of modernity’s terminal incoherence and a principled vision for its transformation. It affirms that a viable future demands more than reform — it requires a fundamental realignment of our systems, values, and selves with the coherence of life itself.