Corinna M. B. Bellizzi
Regenerative enterprise frameworks have proliferated as alternatives to conventional sustainability approaches, promising to restore rather than mitigate harm. However, a critical structural question has received insufficient attention: can these frameworks reliably distinguish authentic regenerative commitment from performative behaviour if they fail to account for the ethical foundations that underpin regenerative practice? This paper presents findings from a cross-comparative case study of five enterprises in the natural products industry. Each enterprise was evaluated through The Regenerative Lens (Buckton et al., 2023), drawing on constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014) and Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical framework to offer a constructive critique of The Regenerative Lens’s coequal architecture, in which care is embedded within Mutualism and justice within Agency, positioned as system qualities. This embedded approach risks undervaluing the role of the ethics of care and justice in creating a truly regenerative enterprise.
Across all five enterprises, care, equity, and justice served as foundational conditions that both preceded and shaped organisational design and stewardship outcomes. This generative precondition emerged consistently, revealing a structural pattern that The Regenerative Lens is not structured to capture. This finding supports a proposed sequential model in which foundational ethics constitute the necessary precondition for authentic regenerative systems design and durable stewardship outcomes: Ethics → Systems Thinking → Stewardship.
The case studies reveal two distinct risks of deferred ethics. The first is the potential for communications teams to lead messaging without sufficient substance (i.e., greenwashing or purposewashing). The second is a structural limitation of observability: frameworks assessed through public-facing outputs could underrate enterprises whose most significant regenerative work occurs upstream and out of view. The paper concludes by proposing an ethics-first pre-assessment protocol as a necessary complement to existing regenerative enterprise frameworks, cautioning that organisations deploying regenerative language without prior ethical grounding risk opening themselves to the very purposewashing and greenwashing they seek to prevent.
Keywords: The Regenerative Lens, cross-comparative case study design, regenerative enterprise, ethics of care, purposewashing, dramaturgical analysis