Regenerating Land, Regenerating Self: Towards a Care-full Regeneration Cycle of Inner-Outer Transformation

Sammanfattning: The world needs rapid transformation if we are to shift towards more just and regenerative socio-ecological futures. In merging scholarly fields of transformation studies, regeneration and ethics of care this thesis explores the connection between inner-outer regeneration through the in-depth study of a transformative caring process. With a focus on lived experience and affects, this study conducted qualitative, ethnographic research at the place-based level of a land regeneration project in southern Spain. As such it finds that outer engagement in land regeneration (care-giving) not only regeneratively affects practitioners’ inner worlds of well-being but also impacts their values and thinking around how to be, think and act with and in the world (care-receiving). Such regenerative capacities hold transformative potential for envisioning and enacting new socionatural relations. It introduces a novel framework of a ‘care-full regeneration cycle’ to discuss the transformative potential of the reciprocal caring process studied in place. With findings linked to emergence, reciprocity and self-organization the study contributes to a relational turn within sustainability transformations.