Modern societies are largely governed by economic indicators that privilege short-term output over long-term resilience. GDP — the monetary value of goods and services produced in an economy — shapes public policy, investment decisions and political accountability. Yet, this measure is structurally blind to ecological degradation, social fragility and the erosion of natural systems that underpin genuine prosperity. For states, multilateral institutions and foresight-driven policy stakeholders, this raises urgent questions about how development is measured, governed and sustained over time. As climate risks, biodiversity loss and resource constraints intensify — often precisely because states pursue GDP growth without biophysical limits — they are increasingly confronted with a fundamental question: how can economic systems recognise that nature is not a “free good” operating outside the economy, but the biophysical foundation and finite ecological infrastructure on which all economic activity and human well-being depend?
Following Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Herman Daly and George Monbiot, the problem is not merely that environmental harms are treated as “externalities” — divergence between private returns and social costs unrecorded in income statements — but that the economy itself is modelled as if it were not constrained by thermodynamic limits. In practice, pollution and resource depletion are excluded from market prices, allowing private gain to diverge from ecological and social costs. Rather than treating nature as an inexhaustible input, it must be governed within ecological limits and be systematically integrated into economic decision-making in ways that internalise the ecological costs of production and respect thermodynamic limits.
As Partha Dasgupta put it in the preface to The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review, “We may have increasingly queried the absence of nature from official conceptions of economic possibilities, but the worry has been left for Sundays. On weekdays, our thinking has remained as usual.” Dasgupta’s review is the canonical script for mainstream economists trying to price nature appropriately and incentivise investment in its preservation.
Within this context, gross ecosystem product (GEP) — referenced by Dasgupta — has emerged as one alternative accounting framework to GDP. Developed by Chinese scientists in 2020 and later endorsed by the UN, GEP recognises that “natural capital” forms the foundation of social, cultural and spiritual stability, integrating these dimensions into its approach to measuring long-term economic sustainability. The language of natural capital, however, has a longer institutional genealogy. Earlier efforts, most notably by the World Bank in the early 2010s to institutionalise natural capital accounting through a global databank, led to the launch of the Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) partnership to incorporate ecosystem services into national accounting systems.
While innovative, such efforts were criticised for being reductionist, treating nature as valuable primarily insofar as it could be economically quantified. In that framing, ecological systems risked becoming legible only through price signals, reinforcing the very extractive logics such valuation sought to reform. GEP departs from this tradition by reframing ecological integrity as a foundational asset rather than a peripheral consideration. Instead of treating environmental protection as a trade-off against economic growth, it positions ecological integrity as constitutive of wealth itself. Yet even here, the paradigm remains largely one of sustainability — focused on maintaining ecological systems over time — and does not yet move fully towards regeneration. Regeneration centres the preservation of ecological systems on the continual renewal of relationships between people, ecosystems and knowledge across generations.
In many indigenous relational ontologies, ecosystems are living relations embedded within moral, spiritual and political orders. From this perspective, the question is not how to better price nature, but how to repair and continually reconstitute reciprocal obligations between human and more-than-human worlds. GEP thus marks an important transition away from extractive growth and towards ecological accounting, but it does not yet fully embrace a regenerative paradigm grounded in relational reciprocity.
Yet, for governments, this shift is consequential. GEP offers a language through which ecological integrity can be integrated into fiscal planning, land-use decisions and development strategies. It challenges the long-standing economic assumption that prosperity must be driven by extraction and consumption, or that nature is a “free” input to production. Once certain ecological thresholds are crossed, damage cannot simply be priced, offset or restored. Research led by the Stockholm Resilience Centre indicates that humanity has now transgressed seven of our nine planetary boundaries necessary for maintaining Earth system stability. In this context, treating ecosystems as expendable assets is not merely inefficient, but structurally destabilising. By positioning ecosystems as productive and irreplaceable systems whose degradation undermines long-term economic and social security, GEP introduces a fiscal vocabulary that renders ecological limits endogenous, even if it stops short of fully reconfiguring the growth paradigm itself.
In practice, GEP remains unevenly applied. Its use has largely been confined to pilot regions and experimental policy settings, where it functions more as a decision-support and signalling tool — used to attract policy attention and frame development choices that integrate ecological values alongside traditional economic metrics — rather than as a binding economic metric or a universally applied alternative to GDP. For example, China has conducted hundreds of pilot GEP accounting projects across provincial, municipal and county levels, adapting different accounting specifications and data methods to local contexts rather than applying a uniform economic standard nationwide. This pattern reflects the experimental nature of GEP’s implementation and its limited integration into mainstream economic planning and the global system of national accounts. This limits its immediate influence, underscoring its role as a transitional framework rather than a finished alternative to GDP.
While GEP assessments in Qinghai, particularly of water-related ecosystem services, produced values comparable to GDP and helped catalyse policy attention and restoration investments, parallel studies across nine Pearl River Delta cities revealed differences in GEP and derived indices across localities, reflecting regional variation in ecosystem service value. These differences underscore how governance authority, tenure regimes and planning horizons shape whether GEP functions as a meaningful planning instrument or a largely symbolic accounting exercise. Clearly, its application requires careful institutional adaptation in each living landscape.
At the level of economic logic, GDP values extraction, production and consumption, registering resource depletion as economic growth, while GEP values ecosystem services, internalising environmental costs and recognising the contribution of natural systems. It aims to incorporate the concept of “payment for ecosystem services” — carbon sequestration services, for instance, can now be quantified in monetary terms according to carbon pricing within a GEP framework. Yet, even as GEP expands the boundaries of economic measurement, it remains rooted in monetary valuation. Its strength lies in making nature legible to policy systems; its limitation is that not all forms of value can be meaningfully translated into prices or metrics.
For indigenous peoples and local communities, the question of value precedes accounting. Long before the emergence of GDP or GEP, many societies organised prosperity around relationships rather than outputs, grounding well-being in reciprocity, continuity, connection with — and care for — living landscapes. This insight resonates with the work of Elinor Ostrom, whose empirical research challenged the deterministic logic of Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons”. Hardin’s model assumed resource users would inevitably overexploit shared resources in the absence of privatisation or state control. Ostrom demonstrated instead that commons collapse is not inevitable; it occurs primarily where pre-existing institutions of knowledge, trust and collective stewardship are absent or undermined.
For many indigenous peoples and local communities, resource governance has historically been embedded within moral economies and intergenerational obligations that render land a socially regulated relation. In such contexts, value is constituted through belonging, responsibility and continuity. Extraction is constrained within value. From this perspective, ecological accounting frameworks such as GEP appear as late institutional translations of principles long embedded in community-based systems of stewardship. For indigenous peoples and local communitiess, this resonates with a relational understanding of the land as living infrastructure; the ecosystem as kin. While GEP monetises ecosystem services to make them “visible” within policy and planning frameworks, indigenous and local conceptions of wealth resist reduction to purely monetary value.
In his book What Money Can’t Buy, political philosopher Michael Sandel argues that some goods are corrupted — not merely priced — when subjected to market valuation. Markets do not merely allocate goods but can also reshape their meaning. Certain goods are degraded when treated as commodities instead of moral or relational commitments. The concern is not simply that ecosystem services are priced, but that the very act of pricing risks turning relationships into transactions. Forests, rivers and grazing lands are not merely productive assets; they are sites of memory, authority, identity and responsibility.
In these systems, wealth is not accumulated but sustained, measured through the endurance of relationships rather than the scale of extraction.
Prosperity, in this redefined framework, is less about cumulative output and more about the durability of relationships within and between communities, ecosystems and the knowledge systems that sustain both. Modern industrial economies, particularly since the Industrial Revolution, have progressively abstracted human well-being from the living landscapes on which it depends. Nature became background infrastructure, a reservoir of inputs rather than a web of relations. This abstraction enabled extraordinary material expansion while deepening ecological and social alienation: communities distanced from food systems, labour detached from land, and “connection” increasingly mediated through technological infrastructures, paradoxically creating disconnection.
Within a relational paradigm, value emerges from reciprocity and respect, the give and take that ensures that forests, water and soils continue to nurture life. To sever these relationships while expecting continued abundance is akin to cutting off the organ that enables breathing while assuming respiration will persist. Regenerative prosperity therefore requires restoring relational continuity rather than merely increasing output through extraction.
For indigenous peoples and local communities, continuity safeguards the collective memory and identity that bind generations. Living landscapes are archives of knowledge and care, not assets to be exhausted.
GDP and even GEP remain bound by economic quantification, while indigenous frameworks define wealth through balance, interaction and renewal.
The challenge, then, is not to replace indigenous worldviews with new metrics, but to allow these relational principles to inform how states design, interpret and govern economic indicators. This integration is not without risk. When relational concepts are translated into formal indicators, they can be stripped of context, reinterpreted through technocratic lenses, or appropriated without meaningful community control. Without safeguards, measurement risks reproducing existing power asymmetries, turning lived relationships into extractive data practices rather than shared governance tools.
Integrating this living perspective into policy calls for new ways of thinking anchored in foresight, adaptability and inclusive learning.
Embedding relational dimensions into GEP means recognising reciprocity and continuity as context-sensitive, indicative and governable qualities of resilience rooted in relational ontologies; and integrating cultural integrity into economic and ecological accounting without reducing it to simplistic metrics. Restoration and regeneration encompass practices such as maintaining and rebuilding soil health, implementing crop rotation, allowing land to lie fallow for ecological recovery, exercising caution in the deployment and use of GMOs and synthetic fertilisers if they compromise long-term ecological balance and supporting ecological recovery through advanced rewilding initiatives wherever feasible. Such practices shift the frame from maximising yield to sustaining relational continuity between humans and ecosystems.
A relational GEP framework would recognise economic productivity and ecological restoration as inseparable, not sequential. It would also embed cultural integrity in accounting systems as an operational principle: extraction must be matched by measurable commitments to regeneration.
Reciprocity could, for instance, be reflected in ecological stewardship indices that record the extent to which resource extraction is meaningfully offset by restoration, regeneration, and the re-establishment of ecological integrity over time. In other words, ecological stewardship indices would assess not only the volume of resource use but the degree to which the three Rs (regeneration, restoration, and rewilding efforts) restore ecological function and empower intergenerational continuity. Continuity could be measured by long-term ecosystem vitality, secure land tenure and intergenerational knowledge transfer, all conditions that stabilise both nature and society.
Reciprocity indicators could measure the degree of sustainable resource exchange between communities and ecosystems. For instance, indices might track the proportion of harvested materials replaced through replanting, soil restoration or traditional rotational practices. A recent systematic review of forest restoration initiatives in Central Africa found that among 26 initiatives, most involved agroforestry or plantations and noted a “lack of monitoring and data sharing” of regeneration outcomes. Another report emphasises that the involvement of local people in regeneration is limited, signalling that the implementation of forest management plans (including regeneration) in community and decentralised forests has to be properly assessed. Additional studies discuss how communities may gain forest-use rights and monitor non-timber forest products in shared forest spaces in the region.
Continuity indicators could assess the long-term stability of cultural and ecological systems together. Variables may include intergenerational land tenure security, biodiversity recovery rates, knowledge transmission programmes, as done in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s miombo woodlands and Lake Tumba, or the persistence of traditional livelihood and other intangible heritage practices contributing to ecological sustainability. For example, continuity is evident when the Andean ayllu networks or the Cree trapline systems maintain the same territories and stewardship practices across generations, preserving ecosystem health and cultural identity.
By embedding reciprocity and continuity into GEP measurement and aligning it with strategic foresight-driven institutions, policy would move beyond “sustainability” as damage control towards regeneration as a guiding principle of development. Prosperity becomes a property of adaptive systems in which economic, social, cultural and ecological well-being reinforce one another over time.
- Dr Metolo Foyet is a global conservation and governance consultant with The Nature Conservancy.
- Dr Julia Baum is an expert associate with the African Wildlife Economy Institute at Stellenbosch University.
- Dr Ross Harvey is chief research officer at Good Governance Africa, and MD of Harvey Economics, a research consultancy firm.
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