Dr. h.c. Anja Carron

Biological resources, ecological data and traditional knowledge are becoming economically legible to markets and institutions faster than many territories are developing the institutions to govern their use. What becomes legible can become valuable and investable before the source territory is ready to act. These reflections examine what current developments change, and what territories need in order to respond on their own terms.

GDP measures economic output. Biodiversity indicators measure dimensions of ecological condition. Each directs attention to a different part of a territory. The Biocultural Capital Index examines what these measures do not capture together: whether a territory can protect, govern and translate its living and cultural wealth into lasting prosperity while retaining authority and capability over the process.

What becomes measurable becomes easier for institutions to see, compare and act upon. The Index widens what can enter territorial decision-making.

The Index does not treat the presence of women, communities or Indigenous knowledge as evidence of inclusion. It examines who holds rights, who controls assets, who participates in decisions, who can enter agreements and where value ultimately settles.

Economic development begins before capital is allocated. Systems do not act on territorial reality directly. They act on what their institutional, market and technological architectures allow them to attend to, represent, recognise, authorize and value.

What enters these decision systems, and what remains outside them, shapes what subsequently receives resources, what becomes capability, and ultimately which futures a territory is able to produce.

Dr. Carron's research examines this conversion process: how biological and cultural wealth moves from attention and institutional legibility through rights, authority and valuation into resource allocation, local capability and territorial transformation.

Recent experimental research in human neuroimmune regulation shows that voluntary attention can influence downstream physiological regulation, not only perception. The biological finding is not a model for territorial systems. It sharpens a broader question: whether what a system attends to influences what it can recognise, prioritise and act upon.

At territorial level, the consequences are concrete. A biological resource can become visible before rights over its use are secured. Traditional knowledge can be documented and made legible to markets or technologies before the institutions and communities that hold it have the authority or capability to act as counterparties. Production can be measured while soil condition, cultural continuity, local knowledge or long-term territorial capability remain outside the decision system.

The working concept of Regenerative Attention Architecture examines whether this conversion from attention into institutional recognition, authority, valuation, resource allocation and capability preserves and renews the ecological, cultural, social and economic capacities on which the system itself depends.

This becomes increasingly important as AI makes biological, ecological and traditional-knowledge data economically legible at unprecedented speed. AI changes what can be detected, connected, represented and brought into decisions. It therefore changes the attention and representation architecture through which economic value is recognised, authority is exercised and capital is directed.

Visibility alone is therefore not the objective.

The central question is whether this process leaves the source territory more capable afterwards, with stronger knowledge, processing capacity, ownership, institutions, ecological capacity and future choices, or simply makes extraction more precise.

This thinking is shared as a keynote and executive briefing.