The challenges society face today are of global scale – climate change, food supply, environmental crisis, economic collapse, inequality are just a few – and the solutions to these issues need to come from different levels of society. Trusting that technology and the classical top-down approach to these issues will solve it all is in our past. Solutions to these challenges may, and do, come with local specific choices and innovations, which often are built and brought to public by Community-Led Initiatives and its networks. According to its website, the Global Ecovillage Network envisions a world of empowered citizens and communities, designing and implementing pathways to a regenerative future while building bridges of hope and international solidarity. GEN Europe applies a five dimension map to a regenerative world, it constitutes economy, culture, social, ecology, and integral design being the connector of them all. This paper examines how GEN Europe, the European branch of the network, mobilizes nationally and internationally to develop a more favorable legislative and institutional environment for the promotion and diffusion of its regenerative innovations. The proximity of GEN Europe to the meta-network ECOLISE, as well as direct dialogue with European institutions, was found to play a big role in the development of programs and legislation. These programs are, for example, in the areas of local economy and energy generation and transmission, the development of people and internal structure of ecovillages and members of the network by scholarships to sponsor labor and volunteers, and facilitating access to credit lines that favor the development of local innovations by members of GEN Europe. This relationship with the political sphere provided tangible results so far to the network, complemented by a horizontal knowledge transmission to all members of the branch through online training, gatherings, webinars, meetings, and peer-to-peer teaching-learning sessions. Therefore, materializing the impact of policies developed throughout the network reach. The implications of this study point to the importance of participating in political processes, directly and through ECOLISE. This process opens the possibility to develop policies that feed the network with possibilities to apply its innovations. The loop continues with the dissemination of these innovations with network reach, which produces more innovations and solutions that are given back to the network to bring into the political sphere, completing the loop that constantly reinvents its innovations reach.

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regenerative innovations,policy,GEN Europe,European institutions,Community-Led Initiatives

• Sociologia - Ciências Sociais
• Ciências Políticas - Ciências Sociais