Tania Rodriguez Riestra – Systems change investing done right
The food, agriculture and planetary systems, for that matter, are all in serious need of change. No news there.
But how? Individual investments and grants, however large, will never be big enough to move these systems. What we need is a serious, deep analysis of the food and agriculture space within a certain context: hundreds of hours of interviews with many stakeholders to map the players, the positive and negative feedback loops, and the intervention points with huge leverage (or not), trying to make sense of the messiness of a system. No, a map is never the territory, but it’s better than no map.
Then what? How do we go from mapping to action? It is key to build dedicated funding vehicles for-profit, low-return, no-return, philanthropy, the whole capital spectrum concentrated on the highest leverage points in a system. And then, and only then, we might have a chance to move something.
CO_ is one of the most interesting regen investment vehicles we have come across, combining deep systems research with long-term, on-the-ground work, weaving until you have a common vision, and then deploying serious capital to make it work.
This is a long conversation where we walk and talk, with some dogs and helicopter noise and butterflies too. We talk water, landscape-scale regeneration, investing in the Global North and South, investor mindsets, relationship to wealth, what is enough, inequality, biodiversity hotspot research and funding, equity vs. debt, and why whales will be on investment committees soon.
