The Mint editor, Henry Leveson-Gower, describes how joining the club could raise the tempo of environmental regeneration.
Earlier this year, a group of farmers who had formed under the banner of regenerative farming, focusing on improving the health of the soil, water, and biodiversity, said, “Enough.” After years of trialling carbon markets, they announced they were walking away. The promised income never matched the costs, the paperwork was suffocating, and — most importantly — the system didn’t reflect how soil and water really work. Their revolt tapped into a growing unease: perhaps turning nature into a set of tradable credits in commodity-type markets is the wrong path altogether (see box: The Revolt).
At the same time, billions are quietly flowing into golf clubs and country clubs worldwide. These organisations, some of which are centuries old, manage vast landscapes for members who willingly pay subscriptions to enjoy them. They don’t trade “golf credits” or commodify time spent on the fairway. Instead, they rely on rules, governance, and community norms.
Their position paper argued that voluntary carbon markets demand simplicity, quantification, and a single metric — design principles that clash with the complex, dynamic reality of regenerative farming. Soil health, water cycles, and biodiversity can’t be reduced to neat tradable units.
Their walkout sparked a wider debate across Europe. It also sent a clear message: if regeneration is to succeed, it needs institutions that respect ecological complexity. Clubs may offer exactly that.
So, why are landscapes managed for biodiversity and water resilience tied to speculative carbon and biodiversity markets, while leisure landscapes thrive under the much older, simpler model of clubs?
Rethinking economics
In mainstream economics, the concept of “club goods” originated with Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan, who proposed them in 1965 as a third category between private and public goods. His insight was simple yet powerful: some resources — such as parks, swimming pools, and even landscapes — can be shared until congestion sets in. Clubs, he argued, provide a way to collectively manage access and rules, ensuring benefits are shared without overuse.
The parallel with today’s food and farming systems is striking. Industrial agriculture maximises private profit but erodes public goods, such as biodiversity and water quality. Seen through Buchanan’s lens, landscapes are precisely the kind of shared resource where club economics could provide a practical analytical framework in a way that commodity economics doesn’t.
Clubs, after all, are everywhere. From scout troops and football teams to golf courses worth billions globally, they operate on subscriptions, rules, and governance. They can be open and inclusive, or closed and exclusive—as the Garrick Club’s belated decision to admit women reminds us. What matters is that they provide a structure for people to pool resources and manage them together (see box, Clubs and commoning).
At their best, clubs can capture the essence of commoning: citizens collaborating directly rather than separating into producers and consumers. True, some clubs are hierarchical or patriarchal. But so too are many commons. What matters for me is the process of agreeing on rules fairly, not whether the institution is labelled “club” or “commons.”
Seen in this light, clubs may be the most familiar—and often overlooked—form of commoning in modern societies.
From theory to practice
Imagine a club that unites landowners with members willing to fund environmental benefits. Instead of rigid contracts, it could develop flexible agreements — on restoring rivers, cutting fertiliser inputs, or removing drainage — guided by science and adapted as circumstances change. Monitoring would provide feedback, and the portfolio approach would help spread risk.
The beauty of the club model is its pragmatism. It avoids the impossibility of writing contracts that cover every future scenario. It can prevent the powerful from shifting risks onto the less powerful. And it creates space for adaptive, long-term stewardship.
This approach also speaks to where real money is flowing. UK water companies alone are committing billions to nature-based solutions over the next five years — far more than carbon or biodiversity markets are likely to deliver (see box, “The money is in water”). For them, ecosystem services like clean water and resource resilience don’t fit neatly into a nature markets framework but are central to their business. Clubs could provide the institutional vehicle for this investment, blending it with other sources of funding. Meanwhile, we have seen regenerative farmers declare that voluntary carbon markets are fundamentally incompatible with their approach.
This is increasingly recognised in the UK: Following the UK regulator’s 2024 review, English and Welsh water companies are expected to invest £3 billion in environmental outcomes over the next five years. An additional £6 billion will address nutrient pollution, alongside £1.3 billion annually for flood and coastal defences from the Environment Agency. The recent review of water regulation also clearly indicates that nature-based solutions are the way forward. There may be a need to improve the regulatory system and evidence base to support this effectively, but the overall direction remains clear.
Overall, this easily surpasses the government’s projected Biodiversity Net Gain market and exceeds the uncertain outlook of carbon trading. In Scotland, publicly owned Scottish Water is also competing for significant investments in nature-based projects.
For anyone designing landscape regeneration finance, water is where the flow of money is strongest.
The role of government
What about the state? Here, the late Nobel laureate, Elinor Ostrom, offers a guide. Her research demonstrated that sustainable resource management doesn’t stem from heavy-handed regulation or centrally designed incentives but from enabling institutions crafted so that communities can make good decisions themselves.
Governments already recognise this logic when they regulate charities to ensure public benefit. They could do the same with landscape clubs: requiring diversity of membership, alignment with regeneration goals, and transparent reporting — without smothering them in red tape. It can be seen as an adaptation of the thinking behind the geodesic dome designed by inventor Buckminster Fuller, which creates stability through tension between its elements. Applied to institutional design, this could deliver integrity in governance, keeping systems resilient while preventing capture by narrow interests, a concept Fuller referred to as tensegrity.
From markets to membership
Shifting from commodified credits to club-based collaboration would mark a profound change. It would mean moving away from speculative financial instruments and towards institutions rooted in shared responsibility.
The model is not alien. Clubs are part of everyday life. By applying their logic to landscapes, we could create regenerative systems that are more robust, more democratic, and better suited to the complexity of nature itself.
The real question is no longer whether nature markets can be made to work. It’s whether nature clubs can deliver the regeneration we urgently need.
