Women Weaving Regenerative Entrepreneurial Futures at the CSW

Across global conversations today, many people are arriving at a shared intuition: the future cannot be built through domination, extraction, and control. If we call that intuition “matriarchal,” we don’t mean a simple reversal of power. We mean a different system. A system in which an economy is organized around care, relationships, and collective responsibility. A system in which women’s and girls’ access to justice includes dignified livelihoods, decision-making power, and economic autonomy.

Such a future can feel abstract, even impossible. We have strong language to critique what is failing but we have fewer shared practices that make alternative realities workable. Our contribution at CSW70 NGO Forum was to offer a grounded pathway: community-led, place-based regeneration through multiple value creation, in which ecological, social, cultural, aesthetic, and financial value are held together rather than traded off.

This work builds on over five years of learning with circular communities worldwide from Nairobi (Kenya), The Galapagos (Ecuador), Buenaventura (Colombia), Cordoba (Argentina), Bali, Kampung, Jakarta (Indonesia), Rotterdam, Gooi and Vechtstreek (the Netherlands), and many more initiatives. All these communities close and maintain resource loops while rebuilding relationships with land and with each other. At a moment when climate change, biodiversity loss, and inequality deepen and governance fails to achieve adequate solutions, these neighborhood-scale practices matter because they are where justice becomes operational: in everyday infrastructures, shared spaces, and local economies.

Key Question

At the CSW70, we engaged in conversations that treat justice as critically intersectional and systemic: women’s and girls’ exposure to crisis is shaped by climate pressures, governance gaps, and unequal access to health, education, and economic resources. What stayed central for us is the practical question: 

"When crises compound, whose practices hold communities together? And why is that labour still so often invisible in how “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” are recognised?"

Intertwined Justice, Economic and Ecological Systems

Our core message was simple and demanding: "If women’s and girls’ access to justice is a global priority, then justice must also be designed into the economic and ecological systems that shape everyday life." 

This means taking seriously that women’s economic autonomy is often built in community settings, through informal care economies, local stewardship, cooperative labour, and small-scale enterprises. And understanding that these realities are frequently excluded from dominant state–market logic and from the measurement of “value”.

We therefore frame circular communities as place-based ecosystems of regenerative entrepreneurship. They generate livelihoods while regenerating land, strengthening social cohesion, and sustaining cultural continuity. From Nairobi to the Galápagos, these initiatives demonstrate how locally rooted practices can inform broader pathways toward equitable, sustainable futures, precisely because they are not only technical solutions but also social agreements about responsibility, ownership, and participation.

Our CSW Event on Weaving Regenerative Entrepreneurial Futures 

Our session combined a presentation, a conversation circle, and a ritual space. We introduced the Circular Value Flower (CVF). This is a method that helps people see the full system that makes community initiatives possible: ambitions and enabling capital, resource flows, actors and collaborations, spatial interventions, and the multiple values produced (Leclercq & Smit, 2023).

Crucially, we positioned the method in relation to justice. If women and girls are to access justice in practice, then economic life must stop treating nature as background and stop treating financial value as the only relevant value. The CVF makes multiple forms of value visible and debatable, including the kinds of value women often carry and produce: relational work, knowledge transmission, cultural care, and the long-term stewardship of territories.

Ritual Space: an immersive bridge into lived realities 

We intentionally opened a ritual space. Why? Because knowledge is shaped through relationships with land, memory, story, feeling, and responsibility. Therefore, land, music, stories, and embodiment can work together as knowledge-creation, sharing, and practice that reconnect learning to territory, relationality, and ethical reflection. It is a way to keep living realities present in the room and to legitimize forms of knowledge that conventional innovation and entrepreneurship settings often ignore (Delgado Medina, 2025).

In our framing, rituals help us enter the work through memoria (memory), dignidad (dignity), and territorio (territory) to remember that value is carried in bodies, homes, and places, not only in spreadsheets. It also creates conditions for participation that are not limited to those who speak the dominant language of 'policy' or 'economy': observation and silent presence are also valid ways of being in the collective.

What we shared from the communities

 In Nairobi, circular communities working in river-adjacent landscapes demonstrate how community-led initiatives can serve as resilience-building and livelihood-creation mechanisms under difficult conditions, while still producing ecological and social value. The workshop approach we shared is designed to: 

• surface what these initiatives already do;
• make their value legible across stakeholder worlds; and to 
• support the co-creation of interventions that strengthen women’s and families’ everyday access to food, safety, and income through local resource systems. 

Across contexts, our emphasis was that community initiatives can enable transitions. They hold the knowledge to reorganize economies around cooperation, participation, and shared governance. 

When women are positioned as leaders in these initiatives, as organizers, stewards, makers, entrepreneurs, and knowledge holders, the pathway to justice becomes materially grounded. Autonomy is not a slogan, but a lived capacity to decide, to earn, to care, and to remain on one’s land and in one’s community with dignity.

Future narratives: from “matriarchy as theory” to community-level practice

Often, matriarchy economies (care-centred, life-supporting, cooperative) stay at the level of conversation, and rarely reach the community level as a lived economic reality. Yet it is precisely at this scale that many of the conditions for women’s and girls’ justice are negotiated: access to resources, the distribution of care work, safety, social support networks, and the possibility of building livelihoods that do not depend on extractive systems.

This is why we insist that framing women’s and girls’ rights needs more lenses than “justice” alone. It requires attending to critical intersections: race, gender, geography, history, climate pressures, hierarchies, health, socioeconomic conditions, social norms, and local and Indigenous knowledge.

And it requires a grounded economic question: how can women exercise financial and economic autonomy within an inherently extractive system—one that neither leverages nor celebrates forms of women’s entrepreneurship and innovation grounded in care, reciprocity, and relationality with their territories, communities, and families?

For multiple value creation, we need different economic systems where ecological embeddedness, regenerative design, holistic values, justice, relationality, participation, and cooperation are central. In other words, an economy that doesn’t extract from humans and non-humans. 

Futures Worth Building

If the future we want is matriarchal in the deeper sense, then we need to practice it into existence. Circular communities offer one concrete arena where this is already happening: where people are reworking resource loops, rethinking ownership, rebuilding trust, taking stewardship over land and its resources and redesigning how value is created and shared. Our invitation, arising from CSW70, is to treat these initiatives not as “local projects” but as living infrastructures of justice, in which women’s and girls’ access to justice encompasses ecological security, cultural continuity, and economic autonomy, enacted through community-led regeneration.

Our book (launching May 2026) contributes to these future narratives by showing how fishers, youth groups, farmers, Indigenous peoples, and local leaders co-create economic models grounded in land, water, and collective well-being, making community-led regeneration visible as a real, practiced pathway. 

By Fátima Delgado Medina & Els Leclercq, Circular Community Foundation

Together with Nuvoni Centre for Innovation Research they brought the Circular Communities approach to the CSW70 NGO Forum in in New York. This initiative was supported by the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Universities and the TU Delft | Female Impact Community.

 

References 

• Delgado Medina, F. (2025). Land, music, stories, and embodiment learning as pedagogies: A Latin American call to rethink education. In J. Gonçalves, T. Verma, & J. Spaaij (Eds.), Evolving education: A manifesto to reimagine higher education. TU Delft OPEN Books. https://doi.org/10.59490/mg.223
• Leclercq, E., & Smit, M. (2023). Circular communities: The Circular Value Flower as a design method for collectively closing resource flows. TU Delft OPEN Books. https://doi.org/10.34641/mg.62