With a growing interest in “regenerative practice” to tackle long-term social, economic and environmental challenges, our new project asks if this concept could transform partnership working. To start the debate, we asked sector leaders about the problem with partnerships.
Senior leaders in our network highlight partnership working as both essential and frequently problematic in practice. Any partnership requires compromise and renegotiation. But when projects are squeezed, partners tend to focus on a narrow set of deliverables at the expense of wider, community-based goals.
We all want a built environment sector equipped to tackle the many challenges our cities face, from homelessness to worklessness, and ill-health to inequity. These challenges are interconnected within place-based systems.
In this paper, we ask if this emerging concept provides the necessary tools to develop new ways of working that address these complex issues, generating trust and a sense of long-term ownership beyond the immediate project lifecycle. The paper feeds into a conversation with sector leaders about transforming collaboration that we hope will lead to a collective commitment to change.
Read the follow-up article after our workshop in January 2026
Can regenerative practice fix the partnership problem?
Why we need partnerships
Partnerships between public and private sector organisations – as well as not-for-profit organisations such as housing associations – are widely recognised as the foundation for delivery, from accelerating housebuilding to reaching net zero.
Private sector partners we spoke to say their public sector clients want to ensure their partnerships reflect local conditions. “Good partnerships are about a total understanding of the positions of those individual partners, the challenges they have,” said one.
However, the differing aims, timescales, and governance arrangements can cause significant difficulties. Some senior private sector leaders believe the public sector has difficulty articulating clear requirements to the market – often characterized by the complaint, “they don’t know what they want”.
In contrast, public sector and non-profit sector leaders talked more about becoming better partners to the private sector, while holding on firmly to their social purpose priorities.
“Principally, their need is commercial,” says Caroline Pillay of L&Q. “Our driver is providing accommodation. It’s about saying, this is the type of organisation we are, and this is our main interest in delivery. That said, you can’t have social purpose if it doesn’t stack up financially.”
The impact of uncertainty
There is a consensus that partnerships are harder, yet more necessary, in a tough economic climate. “Everybody is looking to share risk, because development is very risky right now in the current challenging environment,” notes Matthew Carpen of Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation. “They’re talking about the cost, for sure, but I do think people are increasingly focused on the social and environmental aspects too.”
Lack of certainty is widely recognised as a major problem for the kind of longer-term partnerships required to deliver major development and regeneration projects. “There needs to be a really clear strategic vision that’s well communicated at start to attract the right partners to come aboard, which sounds obvious thing does get missed or gets diluted,” said one private sector leader.
For local authorities focused on improving the lives of the people who live in their patch, finding funding partners who align with their values is essential. Leaders highlighted the importance of understanding their partners’ goals and vice versa.
“When we say we need housing, we also mean we need transport infrastructure, utilities, and social amenities,” says Caroline Harper of Be First, and Future of London chair. “But private capital isn’t driven by the need, it’s driven by the return, which is usually financial. Too often, the public sector still struggles to frame its proposals in terms that resonate with private sector priorities. That’s where the tension lies.”
Local London, the East London sub-regional partnership, is launching a new investment and development forum that will bring boroughs and potential partners from the private sector together to understand the sub-region’s goals.
“Developers say they’re not always clear up front about what local authority requirements mean,” says director Forogh Rahmani. “They want more open dialogue with politicians and senior officers so they can understand where they’re coming from.”
Are partnerships the problem?
Most leaders we spoke to cited successful partnerships as evidence that they can and do work. But they acknowledged that public sector partners are thinking more broadly about the place-based outcomes they want, making resource constraints harder to reconcile.
“The challenge is to be able to form partnerships outside of the constraints rather than find a whizzier model that works within all the issues that we’re dealing with,” says Patrick Dubeck of Lewisham Council. “The political context in which local government operates becomes more prone to change and that has a real bearing on private partners who are reliant on a degree of certainty.”
Several people highlighted the broadening scope of place-based thinking, with drivers such as improving health and wellbeing layered onto housing and regeneration schemes.
“There’s a responsibility on the council to define its expectations for an intervention that results in an improvement to the place.” — Peter George, Ealing Council
In Ealing, the council is shifting its internal culture to encourage planners to act as development partners, looking at impact beyond the site’s red line.
“We should look at development as interventions in place and ask if the whole neighbourhood will be better off as a consequence of that intervention,” says Peter George, the council’s Strategic Director of Economy & Sustainability. “There’s a responsibility on the council to define its expectations for an intervention that results in an improvement to the place.”
What is regenerative practice?
Regenerative practice was conceived to regenerate the environment and reverse our carbon-fuelled trajectory towards climate disaster. If sustainability focuses on reducing harm, regenerative practice puts something back. Nature is treated as a stakeholder of equal importance to humans and the world we have created.
Interest in regenerative practice is emerging as a response to climate change, from agriculture to architecture. Leaders we spoke to are generally aware of the concept of regenerative practice, but less clear about the specifics of how it differs from sustainability or straightforward regeneration.
Put simply, regenerative practice seeks to restore the natural environment. A clear example of regenerative practice in the built environment sector is the legal requirement for any development to deliver a 10 per cent net gain in biodiversity.
“In the built environment, the principles of harmony with nature are less visible, yet just as important.” – Julie Hirigoyen
There are various definitions of regenerative practice, but widespread agreement on a few key characteristics. A non-negotiable is restoring and working within the natural environment as the foundational idea of restorative practice.
Julie Hirigoyen, a former chief executive of the UK Green Building Council and regenerative practice advocate, explains the difference.
“Regeneration projects might improve air quality, but they wouldn’t necessarily be seeking to heal broken ecological systems, which is what regenerative practice requires us to do,” she says. “It’s most common in agriculture, which has an obvious nature interface. In the built environment, the principles of harmony with nature are less visible, yet just as important and often overlooked.”
The focus on nature in turn connects with considering whole systems rather than constituent parts, while embracing complexity and interconnectedness. Regenerative practice takes a longer view and broadens the definition of stakeholders, including future generations.
Widely agreed characteristics of regenerative practice
Based on interviews with sector leaders and a review of established literature on regenerative practice, here we present the most widely agreed characteristics of regenerative practice:
- Seeks to restore the natural environment and ecological health.
- Responds to the uniqueness of places — their history, resources, and needs.
- Considers the whole system, embracing the complexity and interconnectedness of the economy, environment, and social relations.
- Involves all stakeholders, while broadening the definition of a stakeholder.
- Long-term thinking measured in generations, not years.
- Process designed to enhance social relationships such as ownership, co-creation, stewardship and trust.
About place-based regenerative practice
We have been inspired by several organisations that have applied regenerative practice to placemaking.
Arup defines the goal of regenerative urban design as creating positive impacts on human and natural systems, while fostering co-existence between humans and nature.
The Really Regenerative Centre was set up to develop regenerative, place-based practice and advocates a radical paradigm shift in thinking about urban development. In a report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the centre studied “the enabling conditions for communities to steward regenerative transformation of their places”.
In the US, Regenesis is credited as a thought leader in introducing regenerative practice to placemaking, arguing that “deep and practical understanding of the unique dynamics of a place is critical to regenerative planning and development”.
Partnerships for regenerative practice
So, what are regenerative partnerships? The short answer is we don’t know – yet. But given the challenges faced by the built environment sector, we are asking if regenerative practice could help partners come together to address those challenges.
We want to explore if this concept can be used to frame partnerships in a way that sustains a focus on long-term goals that are socially, environmentally and economically sustainable.
“Local authorities can often set the tone, but readiness from private sector organisations and community involvement is needed as well.” – Siân Whyte, The Young Foundation
One question to address is whether that means forming partnerships to deliver regenerative projects, or if the partnerships themselves could in some way be regenerative? The response to that question from people familiar with regenerative practice was “both.”
“Commitment from all partners is vital, enabling them to come together to act and work differently together,” says Siân Whyte of The Young Foundation. “Local authorities can often set the tone because they have a deep and inherent link to place, but readiness from private sector organisations is needed as well, as is community involvement. We absolutely need new mechanisms for working together across public and private sectors with the community.”
We think that embracing regenerative principles may lead to longer-term partnerships. For instance, as we have argued in our work on co-production, broadening the range of stakeholders and involving them at a formative stage can increase community trust – conditions in which a development partnership is more likely to succeed.
Regenerative practice and system change
It’s clear from talking to sector leaders that the challenges facing successful partnerships mean that simply applying go-faster stripes to a joint venture vehicle isn’t sufficient. Regenerative practice champions advocate for a systems change rather than merely a new partnership delivery model.
“The sector’s business model needs a more fundamental change,” according to a paper called Unleashing a Regenerative Revolution for the Built Environment, co-authored by Julie Hirigoyen. “It must move beyond causing some harm alongside its benefits, to being restorative and regenerative, with an entirely positive impact on people and the planet.”
Indy Johar, co-founder of Dark Matters Labs, called for a profound shift towards large, multi-stakeholder partnerships at our climate conferecne last year. A recent paper by Dark Matter Labs spelled out the challenge and called on architects and their collaborators to use “their collective power to dismantle the systems of power that limit transformation across scales.”
So the regenerative practice agenda is radical, and its advocates are demanding real system change. For most housing and regeneration professionals in the sector, critiquing capitalism isn’t part of the job description!
However, many that we spoke to – particularly in the public sector – recognised that delivering the best scheme possible within the viability constraints shouldn’t stop them pushing for more from partners.
“Climate change is certainly driving partnership decisions,” says Matthew Essex of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. “Partners who can’t evidence their commitment to addressing that are likely to find themselves squeezed out from relationships with local authorities.”
Conclusions and next steps
The challenges facing successful partnerships inevitably mean working within existing constraints, but the ambition of regenerative practice may encourage partners to push at the boundaries of those constraints.
Conversations with our network lead us to conclude the problem is less about perfecting existing partnership models and more about addressing the constraints in which they operate.
We do believe that widening the group of stakeholders involved in any project can increase trust and ownership, and therefore the sustainability of the partnership.
Long-term thinking and adopting a stewardship approach can help unlock new investment models (eg whole-life costing, regeneration premium) that could help with viability and support more ambitious place-based goals.
Finally, acting to stop climate change and start to restore the natural environment and working with nature is the right thing to do, and is a non-negotiable component of a truly regenerative approach.
We would encourage people in our network to find out more about regenerative practice and consider ways to apply the principles to future projects. As Future of London, we will create opportunities to learn and discuss the potential for developing new partnership approaches.
Contributors
Thanks to all the senior leaders from the public, private and not-for profit sectors we spoke to for this article.
- Matthew Carpen, Chief Executive, Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC)
- Patrick Dubeck, Director of Inclusive Regeneration, Lewisham Council
- Matthew Essex, Executive Director of Place, Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames
- Peter George, Strategic Director of Economy & Sustainability, Ealing Council
- Caroline Harper, Interim Managing Director, Be First
- Alyson Heald, Partnerships Director NW, L&Q
- Julie Hirigoyen, Non-executive director and former chief executive of the UK Green Building Council
- Oliver Maury, Partner and Head of Development Advisory, Montagu Evans
- David Meecham, Partner, TLT
- Jo Negrini, Director, Arup
- Caroline Pillay, Director of Development & Regeneration, L&Q
- Forogh Rahmani, Director, Local London
- Siân Whyte, Interim Co-Director of Research, The Young Foundation
- Lucy Webb, Partner, Inner Circle Consulting
Thanks to the project sponsors
Arup | Inner Circle Consulting | Montagu Evans | TLT
