The complex challenges facing today’s world, ranging from climate change to social inequities, require investment strategies that go far beyond short-term returns or single-issue interventions. This is where system investing steps in. Rather than treating symptoms in isolation, system investing recognises that lasting solutions emerge when entire ecosystems — economic, social, and environmental — are strengthened from within.
In this document, we lay out both the principles and the practical frameworks of system investing. We begin by defining what system investing is and why it matters, illustrating how a single investment can yield benefits for multiple stakeholders, sectors, and communities. Building on this conceptual foundation, we explore how value itself is being reimagined — from the unbundling of property rights to the creation of dynamic value chains and mesh economies. This evolving view of value organisation underpins system investing’s capacity for transformational impact. We detail the key dimensions and core functions that make system-scale financing possible, covering everything from many-to-many agreement platforms to independent governance structures. Taken together, these insights offer an initial roadmap for investors, policymakers, and communities aiming to create systemic, regenerative impact.
Many of these principles and frameworks are emerging directly from hands-on practice and insights we’ve gained while contributing to the development of system financing across multiple landscapes and portfolios. They represent, at best, partially tested hypotheses that continue to evolve through ongoing learning and experimentation. This documentation aims to both give back to the field from which we’ve been learning and to build a shared vocabulary and understanding of the complex opportunity spaces arising in this work.
We welcome critique, contributions, and collaborations, recognising that these tools will be refined as we apply them in real-world contexts and as our collective work scales toward transformative impact. Ultimately, we see this work as a catalyst for collective exploration. Consider this an open invitation for partnership in advancing regenerative, system-wide transformation—particularly around the key strategic pathways and portfolios outlined here.
Case Study:
A Living City as Systemic Demonstration
In the northeast of a former industrial nation, one mid-sized city—let’s call it Ederfield—has been quietly demonstrating the power of system-scale transition. Once marked by the decline of heavy manufacturing and fragmented urban planning, Ederfield is now emerging as a model of regenerative urbanism through place-based investment in nature-based infrastructure. Yet what makes this city’s story especially relevant is not just the outcomes it has produced, but the structure of value it has activated—and the system logic it exemplifies.
Ederfield’s transformation offers a real-world instantiation of the principles outlined in this document: the transition from discrete, extractive investments to coherent, generative systems of value creation. Through a layered greening strategy—converting derelict infrastructure into biodiverse corridors, reactivating underused land, and integrating ecological design into transport and flood management—the city has built more than a collection of green assets. It has scaffolded a whole-system transition.
This case study is not offered as a replicable blueprint. Rather, it is a narrative of how systemic investment logic takes form in practice—how a city can move beyond project financing into dynamic value orchestration, and how capital can catalyse capabilities that endure beyond the transaction.
Ederfield’s experience underscores that systemic transformation is not only a technical or ecological proposition, but an economic and civic one. Its success required the alignment of multiple agents: city officials, local businesses, ecological designers, insurers, investors, and communities—all coordinated around a theory of transformation held in common. Infrastructure was not merely built—it was leveraged to create civic trust, local livelihoods, new supply chains, and distributed governance.
This introduction is a framing lens. What follows is an anatomy of a transition-in-motion—one that unfolds through capital, care, and coordination across time. As each layer of value builds upon the last, Ederfield becomes more than a city—it becomes a site of learning for how to structure economies that regenerate rather than deplete, connect rather than isolate, and distribute rather than extract.
While Ederfield is obviously a fictitious city, the case study is informed by ongoing work in cities we work with and speculative extrapolations of their developmental trajectories.
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Events: We are planning to host a couple of online sessions together with TWIST to discuss the learnings and contextualise them in the lived experience of other practitioners.