How fourteen years of different tactics taught us about where real leverage lies.
When we founded Metabolic in 2012, our mission was (and remains) to bring the global economy within planetary boundaries. The thesis was that systems change requires coordinated action across many scales and ways of working. So, our strategy was to work concurrently across the main leverage points we identified – advising corporates, supporting cities in their transitions, building new ventures, conducting applied research, advancing new policies, and implementing working demonstration projects in local communities. We approached each leverage point with the logic and capabilities that were required, which in turn led us to create an ‘ecosystem’ of specialized organizations.
Fourteen years on, that strategy has produced a substantial body of work, as well as a much sharper view of its limits. The most important thing it gave us is a much more substantiated response to a question we are continuously asking: where, in a problem this large and complex, can we act to genuinely move the needle?
A year and a half ago, we restructured Metabolic around our answer. This is an overview of how we got there and what we are doing now.
Where we started: addressing the implementation gap
At the start of the 2010s, when Metabolic was founded, the sustainability field was producing extensive strategic analyses that were largely not being implemented. Public and private organizations wanted analytical reports and strategic plans, but the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it at the scale required kept widening.
Metabolic was founded to address that gap. Not as another consultancy, not as a venture studio, not as a research lab, but as an organization working across all these domains in service of driving real systems change – aiming to carry the work all the way through, from analysis to implementation. We approached the gaps we found with an entrepreneurial ethos, building organizations and initiatives that could grow to address the scale of the challenge.
One of our earliest projects was De Ceuvel, a brownfield redevelopment that launched in 2012 on a polluted former shipyard in Amsterdam North. The project transformed the site into a regenerative “cleantech playground,” with seventeen retrofitted houseboats craned onto land, soils cleaned through phytoremediation, and energy, water, and nutrient cycles closed at a hyperlocal scale. One of the special things about the project was how it was able to bring in diverse stakeholders; arts and culture were activated through the many festivals each year, the cafe attracted the broader public, and research collaborations with water and energy authorities explored the feasibility of alternative approaches. Thousands of experts, officials, and researchers have come from all over the world to learn from De Ceuvel, inspiring them to explore similar projects adapted to their contexts.
An ecosystem of organizations built to address different challenges
Over the following decade, Metabolic built a complex group of organizations. We established Metabolic Foundation in 2014 to build community-driven solutions to local economic and environmental challenges. We spun off Spectral in 2015 to take a big swing at the energy transition. We built up our consulting practice to support corporations, cities, and NGOs to take a systems approach to challenges and implement meaningful transformations.
Observing the limitations of short-term projects for specific clients, we established Metabolic Institute in 2019 to conduct applied, longer-term research on global and regional systems to deliver critical insights needed by a rapidly evolving field. We founded Metabolic Software in 2020 to democratize and scale sustainability intelligence. And, observing that we needed new ventures to address critical gaps in different sectors and issue areas, we established Metabolic Ventures in 2021 to more systematically build organizations (and the organizations and programs that built them) in a way that reflected a new economic ethos. Soon after, Metabolic Ventures co-founded Fresh, an intensive training program combined with a venture studio focused on building new organizations to transform the food system.
Our theory was that working all these levers simultaneously could compound into change at the appropriate scale. It was hard work, but it was deeply motivating and fulfilling.
An ecosystem that failed to cohere
The ecosystem we built – and the incredible individuals that worked across it – produced excellent work. But it never quite gelled into a coherent system.
Each entity logically created different strategies for their work, and each had different audiences, funders, business models, and inherent capabilities. The deeper issue was structural: all the entities were required to generate revenue to support their continued work, and each did so through a different business model. Though we had common theories of change, we were unable to control and direct where the different capabilities were deployed. Our consultancy might be working on a potato value chain for a corporate client in Europe, while our research institute focused on food policy in Asia. Our capabilities were not being coherently deployed across value chains or places, which made it very challenging to build on the work we were doing in a coherent way that added up to more than the sum of its parts.
We spent a lot of energy keeping everyone together – sharing learnings, finding synergies, maintaining legitimacy, and feeling like one cohesive team. Senior staff became stretched thin. Silos emerged despite our best efforts. Without excess capital available to make collective direction enforceable, the market dynamics simply pulled the different organizations apart. Despite people’s best intentions, it eventually became clear that it was largely impractical to work together towards unified goals.
Reorganizing around new insights
In early 2025, we restructured Metabolic. This was partly a forced choice, largely the result of a series of blows to the sustainability sector that were difficult to recover from. But an equal part of it was strategic and what we had been moving toward – and it represented an opportunity for us to focus on where we felt we could have the most impact.
Our approach was not achievable within the complex structure we had built. We had seen the limits of each track on its own, and the combined limit of all of them together. The two arms of the ecosystem most tightly coupled to large corporate supply chains were wound down. What remained was the core of the work we had been committed to from the start, plus a much clearer view of what we had to do next.
What 14 years and 1000 projects taught us
Although we struggled to coordinate a multi-entity ecosystem to work towards focused outcomes, after around 1000 projects across public and private actors, several patterns kept showing up.
Yes, companies are constrained by short-termism, market dynamics, and fiduciary duty, but they also (largely) genuinely want to source from supply chains that are not destroying the ecosystems they depend upon. However, even the world’s largest corporations are incapable of undertaking the landscape-level work required to shift that system; they lack the mandate, the budget at the appropriate scale, and the convening power to assemble the alliances such work requires. A company can invest in a particular supplier or a particular set of farms, but the leverage required to transform a regional economy is structurally beyond the reach of any single firm.
We saw a different but related pattern emerge from the more than 200 cities engaged through our urban transition work. Cities and regions generally know what they need to do, and they often produce credible plans for doing it. A lack of financial resources is a common barrier, but equally challenging are the layered jurisdictions and slow (if sometimes impossible) process of policy change. Capacity, knowledge, strategic attention, and decision-making power are chronically in short supply. This wider set of resources is what we call “poly-capital,” and deploying it coherently and in sequence is what we believe transformational economic change actually requires.
Ventures, while exciting vehicles that can tackle narrow problems with unique business models and user-centric products and services, face their own limitations. Each venture is naturally built to optimize for its own product-market fit, not for the system in which it operates. Capital flows to the most scalable and successful solutions, not to the connective infrastructure between them or the conditions that make them possible.
This is not to say that we don’t need all of these things. We do. We need corporate commitments to invest in truly sustainable (and ideally, regenerative) supply chains, just as we need governments pushing the boundaries of what is possible. And we need passionate entrepreneurs starting new mission-driven organizations that address discrete challenges. But what our experience pointed to was that the optimal scale (at least for us) existed one scale up.
A renewed strategy, with a poly-capital approach and a deep focus on place
Our conclusion was that the leverage we had been searching for sits in the regional system – and not in any single firm, city, or venture. This insight became the foundation for how we restructured Metabolic. Now we are applying everything we have developed, the relationships, the portfolio of experiences across these different ways of working, with a focus on one coherent entry point: driving whole economic transitions in specific places.
What we mean by “place”
By place, we mean a region or landscape, ideally bioregional in scale. The interlocking systems that need to move together – ecology, value chains, governance, infrastructure, social fabric – are all bound to specific geographies, and have to move together for change to be durable.
The case for working at this scale is partly empirical and partly built into how economies function. Above the regional scale, levers become abstract and bureaucratic. Below it, actions are too small to compound into durable change. The region is the scale where those layers are dense enough to interact, yet small enough for us as an organization to engage with directly. Bioregions add the critical advantage of aligning human geography with ecology and natural capital: the watersheds, soils, and other natural ecosystems that have shaped communities, economies, and cultures over generations.
How we work, place by place
We describe our work at such a scale as poly-capital orchestration. We begin each engagement with a data-rich baseline of the local economy, its landscapes, and how capital – financial and otherwise – flows through them. This is paired with deep listening across the people who live there and the stakeholders already doing important work. From those two inputs, top-down and bottom-up, we identify the transition pathways (essentially outcomes or goals) that are most relevant to the region and its citizens.
We then build the portfolios of interventions, capital architectures, and institutions they require so public, private, philanthropic, and civic capital can align around what each does best.
We see our role as a guest capital orchestrator: close enough to assemble that architecture and steward its first five to ten years, but structured to hand it off to local institutions, which in some cases we will need to help build from scratch.
Why this can work at scale
What makes this workable at an appropriate scale, rather than another well-intentioned regional pilot, is alignment with what large capital allocators already want and rarely find: long-duration assets in climate-resilient economies, risk dispersed across interlocking interventions, and outcomes that compound across sectors. The architectures we are building exists to give that capital a credible place to land, and the portfolios we pull together help synergize activities. The work depends less on persuading allocators of a new logic than on building the infrastructure that operationalizes the logic many of them already share.
Working across three scales
Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, is often quoted as saying, “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” Systems do not need to be repaired all at once for them to change – a prospect anyone in this field would find bewildering. Instead, these unbalanced systems can be tipped by small pockets where things are working coherently, in places dense enough in their internal alignment that the surrounding system starts to organize itself around them.
Meso scale
Regional transitions, done well, are exactly like that. They are deliberately constructed islands of coherence in which ecology, capital, governance, and human attention are brought into enough alignment that they demonstrate a healthy and viable pathway forward, and the surrounding system reorganizes.
At the same time, nothing in nature is truly an island. There are many different tendrils of interconnection between people, organizations, and places that we’re continuously looking to build and strengthen as we create networks – or archipelagos – of efforts to repattern the world. This is the main focus of our work, and the heart of how Metabolic now operates. We pursue this work alongside other partners and collaborators, who take different approaches in different geographies but have arrived at similar conclusions.
Our current primary focus area is the western half of North Carolina, where we have worked for close to a decade. On the surface, the work may appear to be a layered capital vehicle and an investable portfolio of regional interventions alongside grant funding and technical assistance. But the reality is much more complex, interesting, and motivating; it involves weaving together relationships, collaboratively building new value chains, and seeding new innovation ecosystems. We are also playing supporting roles in Spain, Mexico, Ghana, and Ireland, where similar patterns of long presence and a deep attention to the nuances of place are starting to make orchestration possible.
Micro scale
Underneath this regional scale, we are also focused on what we label the ‘micro scale’, which involves developing physical sites that ground regional transitions in places that people can experience. These projects will look differently depending on what the region and key stakeholders need – they could be advanced demonstration farms, rural biohubs providing economic infrastructure, urban innovation hubs, and so on. They build on our own experience with De Ceuvel in Amsterdam and the Innovation Barn in Charlotte, North Carolina, along with the many examples we’ve seen of place-based projects pulling together ecology, innovation, and stakeholders while putting new economic thinking into practice – which we will say more about in our forthcoming paper on BioHubs.
Macro scale
At the macro level, we continue working at the global scale – analyzing planetary systems and tipping points, and asking how our regional work can most meaningfully connect to and contribute to reducing vulnerability to them. With the Collaborative for Systemic Climate Action, we’re working to advance how complimentary organizations can work together and meet the scale of our challenges, while connecting regional and place-based work with the international flows of policy, capital, and learning. As a founding member of the Systems Transformation Hub, we are driven to continue bringing systems thinking into European-wide policy and implementation efforts.
Each scale has a ceiling
What fourteen years across these three scales has slowly taught us is that the work of connecting them is itself a discipline. Each scale of work is necessary, and each, on its own, has a ceiling. Macro analysis without grounded action remains theoretical. Place-based projects without regional and international orientation can stay too local in their reach. Regional orchestration without either can easily drift. What we are now structured to do, and what we have not always been structured to do, is let the three feed each other – the macro supplying intelligence, capital pathways, and a sense of where the leverage actually lies; the meso doing the patient work of orchestration on the ground; and the micro making the orchestration visible and replicable.
This is, in the end, what islands of coherence do. Each one that takes root sharpens what we know about how the next can be built, and changes what the surrounding system treats as possible. Over time, a substrate of regional resilience starts to form, and with it, a slow shift in what capital allocators expect to see, what policymakers can credibly support, and what people living through these transitions can imagine as possible. That substrate does not yet exist at the scale the current moment requires. But we are increasingly convinced of where it has to be built – and that it has to be built in specific places, by organizations willing to stay long enough to see it through.
What lies ahead
We are at the beginning of this chapter of work. The thesis we have laid out here is one we believe in, but we hold it the way you hold a hypothesis: confidently enough to act on, loosely enough to revise it as we learn. Our first regional engagements are underway, and the frameworks beneath them are still being built and refined. Some of what we are doing will work. Some of it will not. But we will learn a lot in the coming years, and we will share what we learn as we go – both the proof points where the work succeeds and the honest accounts of where it does not.
If you are a capital allocator, regional leader, or peer thinking about systemic finance, and the leverage question is one you have been circling too, we would be happy to have a conversation. At this stage, the questions we are carrying matter more to us than the answers we already have.
This week, we’re launching the BioHubs paper at Katapult Future Festival, alongside a dedicated companion site. Follow along through our newsletter or via LinkedIn.
