Sustainability has been a primary focus for societies, policymakers, and businesses globally (Agyemang et al., 2025; White et al., 2025). Corporations and businesses pursuing sustainability seek to reduce the negative impacts of their operations on the environment and society. Sustainable business models have gained widespread attention, sustainability reporting has become near-universal among large companies, and environmental management systems have diffused across global value chains. However, the biophysical indicators that matter continue to deteriorate. The ecological thresholds that scholars were urged to take seriously more than a decade ago continue to be breached (Whiteman et al., 2013), and progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has largely stalled (Greenland et al., 2023; Khot et al., 2026). It is increasingly recognized that sustainability, while fundamental, may be insufficient on its own, as many pressing challenges require the restoration and renewal of existing systems rather than their mere preservation (Väätänen, 2025). A paradigm built on doing less harm cannot, by construction, restore systems that are already degraded (Reed, 2007; Hickel, 2019).
Growing interest has been directed toward regeneration, an approach that extends beyond sustaining existing systems by emphasizing restoration, renewal, resilience, and the creation of conditions that enable ecosystems, societies, markets, and firms to flourish over the long run (Camrass, 2020; Thomas, 2025). Regenerative businesses refer to those “that enhance, and thrive through, the health of social-ecological systems in a co-evolutionary process” (Hahn and Tampe, 2021, p. 456). Regenerative business models are oriented toward planetary health and societal well-being rather than the firm's own resource efficiency (Konietzko et al., 2023). A regenerative perspective highlights a system-based definition of goals (goals derive from system health rather than competitive position), an adaptive management orientation (regeneration is an ongoing process rather than a fixed end state), and a net positive ambition (the firm gives back more than it takes).
Regeneration extends sustainability (Yunibandhu and Hallinger, 2025) and differs from it in several ways. First, regarding the nature of the firm – sustainability typically views the firm as an entity that affects an external environment, whereas regeneration considers the firm as part of a living system whose viability is inseparable from that of the system as a whole. This distinction reflects the difference between weak and strong sustainability and supports Hahn and Tampe's (2021) argument that regenerative goals cannot be grounded solely in business interests. Second, with respect to objectives: sustainability aims for equilibrium by balancing economic, social, and environmental priorities within existing frameworks, while regeneration seeks vitality and co-evolution. According to resilience theory, adaptive cycles of growth, release, and reorganization characterize living systems (Holling, 1973). Within this view, disturbance becomes an opportunity for renewal rather than a threat to stability. Recent cross-disciplinary research clarifies this transition by specifying qualities that maintain regenerative dynamics across social-ecological scales (Buckton et al., 2023; Fischer et al., 2024). Third, in terms of practice, sustainability is frequently dominated by efficiency logics that narrow, slow and close resource loops. Regeneration adds restoration and active enhancement of the socio-ecological base (Das and Bocken, 2024). This also clarifies the boundary with the circular economy. Circularity is a necessary but insufficient condition for regeneration, since closed-loop efficiency alone cannot restore what has already been lost (Morseletto, 2020).
Despite increasing interest in regenerative business, empirical work remains relatively limited. Research is also concentrated in a few settings, including agriculture and food systems with measurable outcomes in soil, carbon and biodiversity (e.g. Sher et al., 2024) and hospitality and tourism (e.g. Dredge, 2022). However, much of the latter is still superficial (Bellato and Pollock, 2025). Research on rural development, regenerative supply chains, innovation and finance is emerging but remains fragmented (Salonen et al., 2025). Other areas such as marketing, accounting and international trade remain underrepresented and warrant further exploration.
Prior work has been anchored mainly in systems thinking, with extensions via business-model and stakeholder perspectives (Hahn and Tampe, 2021; Konietzko et al., 2023). By contrast, behavioral and institutional explanations for how firms and consumers respond to regenerative claims remain limited, despite their importance for understanding implementation tensions. Measurement issues are evident and the operationalization of concepts across contexts remains nascent. For example, Fischer-Kreer et al. (2026) validate a 12-item, two-factor scale of firm-level regenerative orientation, while Chuah et al. (2025) offer a complementary concept map but report an unstable factor structure. What remains missing is robust measurement beyond the firm level (for consumer perception, supply chains and places) and evidence of cross-cultural validity. A key unresolved research question, therefore, concerns how regenerative claims are interpreted and acted upon across different organizational, consumer and cultural contexts and whether existing measurement approaches are sufficiently robust to capture these variations. In particular, more studies in emerging and developing economies are needed, since regenerative expectations are often transmitted through export value chains as compliance requirements, which can shift transition costs onto upstream suppliers and raise distributive questions about who should bear those costs.
To sum up, regeneration does not render sustainability obsolete. Rather, it extends the foundations of sustainability (Yunibandhu and Hallinger, 2025). Harm reduction remains essential, while regeneration articulates a more ambitious agenda for restoration and renewal. Whether the field consolidates will depend on a clearer conceptual definition, rigorous measurement and systematic empirical testing. It will also benefit from more research conducted in emerging and developing economies, which are more exposed to ecological and social pressures yet underrepresented in the literature (Chuah et al., 2025).
