Stewardship in Liminal Times

An Orientation for a World Beyond Modernity

Introduction

This text has been brewing for years, born of over 30 years of work at the edges of enterprising, leadership, and alternative governance. It emerges from a liminal time – where modernity’s promises of progress and control have frayed, yet no clear alternatives have fully taken their place.

My inquiry into stewardship is rooted primarily in enterprising contexts, where I believe it is most urgently needed. But engaging with it requires an underlying willingness to question the mental models and practices that shape how we relate to life on Earth. I’ve come to understand stewardship not as a technique to master or a list of virtues, but as an orientation, a shift toward long-term relational responsibility, both individually and collectively.

For me, practicing stewardship has been a living inquiry into my place, responsibilities, and belonging within interdependent systems – human and more-than-human. It has reshaped how I understand meaning, value, and the futures we co-create. By nature, this is a philosophical exploration, but I’ve found it to be surprisingly practical as well.

This text is an invitation to conversation. Comment, question, or propose clarifications, or simply suggest we meet for a fika. You’re welcome to share it, with the understanding that the content will continue to evolve with our collective learning.

I’ve divided the text into eleven sections, in a sequence that I think works. But feel free to jump in anywhere and read in your own way.

— Jan

Why Stewardship Matters
What is Stewardship?
Characteristics of a Steward
Connecting Purpose, Culture, and Structure
An Economic Perspective
Why Orient Enterprising Towards Stewardship?
Investing in Stewardship
Examples of Enterprising Based on Stewardship
Making the move
Repurposing Ownership
Closing

1. Why Stewardship Matters

If we accept that humans have become a dominant shaping force on the planet, we also need to acknowledge that we are bad at being a custodian species. Our patterns of extraction and the degradation of the biosphere are taking us beyond the life-supporting planetary boundaries – boundaries upon which we, too, depend.

Stewardship reminds us that there is no “us” and “them.” We exist only with and through the biosphere’s generosity. Because of our dominance, what we do and don’t do matters immensely. In the playful wisdom of Pippi Longstocking, “If you are very strong, you must also be very kind.” Stewardship embodies this kindness – not only towards other humans, but towards everything.

Stewardship is not a choice between self-interest and service – it transcends this false dichotomy. It is an orientation. One that recognises that our thriving is inseparable from the thriving of all we touch. If this rings true then we should answer all calls to examine our cultures, practices, and systems of organisation, and to address what denies or undermines life’s generative capacity. Currently, the species extinction rate due to human activity is estimated between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than natural extinction rates. These are not numbers to shrug off or be proud of.

This said, stewardship is not only about tending what still remains. It is also about repairing and regenerating what has been degraded, and redistributing what has been hoarded for personal gain. Stewardship is in its essence a reorientation from ownership to belonging, from control to care, and from extraction to reciprocity.

Modernity has created much for humans, but the negative consequences are increasingly obvious. For those that pay attention, the signs of accelerating societal unraveling cannot be missed. However, what comes after is still not visible. In this, stewardship offers a timeless way of relating to life, holding uncertainty and complexity, and working with what is emerging instead of romanticising the past.

2. What is Stewardship?

Stewardship is often described as the acceptance of responsibility to shepherd and safeguard that which is valuable to others. Yet this definition risks framing stewardship as guardianship over “resources”, thus perpetuating human-centred ownership logics.

A deeper view of stewardship understands it as:

An active commitment to remain in right relation (note 1) with the webs of life we participate in.
A practice of tending, caring, and co-creating conditions for mutuality over dominance or personal gain.
A refusal to treat life as property, and instead a dedication to serve as a conduit for life’s ongoing renewal.

In practical contexts, stewardship reshapes decisions and actions in ecosystems, organisations, governance, or daily life, and shifted towards integrity, accountability, and prioritising collective wellbeing over isolated gain.

Within enterprises, stewardship has often been reduced to fiduciary duties focused on long-term shareholder value. However, true stewardship asks us to move beyond institutionalised praxis such as limited liability and externalities accounting, towards an economy where no life is external to consideration, and where enterprise serves life, not the reverse.

3. Characteristics of a Steward

As I have suggested, stewardship is not a list of traits to adopt, but an orientation towards life and enterprising rooted in humility, care, and relational responsibility. Still, it can be helpful to describe how stewards often move and relate in the world, so we can get a sense of what stewardship entails as a lived practice. The following characteristics are not a checklist, nor are they exhaustive. Stewards are diverse, and what unites them is not the traits in themselves, but the commitment to serve life more fully.

Responsibility and Accountability
Recognising themselves as participants in complex webs of life and impact, stewards take responsibility not only for direct actions, but for how choices are shaped by (and shape) conditions for others, including the more-than-human world. Accountability here is not about issuing blame or punishing, but about owning up to relational care and continuous learning. But how can responsibility be cultivated when the systems we are part of actively discourage it?

Integrity and Regeneration
Aligning words and actions with deep ethical commitments, stewards cultivate principles and practices that restore, heal, and enhance life’s capacity to continue. Integrity is not personal virtue-signalling, but being in systemic coherence and in right relation with life. Yet how can integrity be maintained when the dominant culture rewards its opposite?

Empathy and Adaptation
Extending empathy beyond in-groups, and even beyond human stakeholders, stewards recognise that contexts for decisions and choices are formed by and ripple through ecologies, communities, and generations. They remain responsive to what wants to emerge, accepting and holding uncertainty and complexity as natural. And can empathy for the more-than-human truly shape decisions in a world that prioritises human gain?

Vision and Collaboration
Stewards hold and nurture visions as invitations for collective imagination and long-term thriving, rather than imposing their ideas or strategic plans. They prioritise mutuality and co-creation, listening deeply to diverse perspectives, and sharing power and participation. Then, how can we hold visions without falling into the trap of control or exclusion?

These characteristics should not be seen as a blueprint, but rather as a glimpse into how stewardship can manifest itself in humans. Also they are not about perfection, but about the ongoing work of learning and aligning with life’s complexity and interdependence.

4. Connecting Purpose, Culture, and Structure

Stewardship is a vulnerable and even subversive practice in a world organised around self-interest, extraction, accumulation, and control. It cannot thrive on good will alone. Without cultures, structures, and frameworks designed to support stewardship, it remains marginal, fragile, and is frequently co-opted by the dominant logics of efficiency or growth. I have found it helpful to develop awareness and discipline around the most fundamental conditions for stewardship to take hold. These are:

Purpose as Service
Stewardship is dependent on the purpose of an endeavour to be aligned with life-serving principles. It needs to be set in values and context, and not just state desired outcomes. If purpose is anchored in extraction, dominance, or mere profit maximisation, stewardship will most likely be co-opted and at best become something performative.

Culture as Relational Soil
Even with a purpose aligned towards life, if the culture of an organisation is transactional, competitive, fearful, or hierarchical, stewardship struggles to root. Culture needs to carry the purpose and shape the everyday textures of how people relate, decide, and act together. Stewardship requires cultures that honour life, emergence, reciprocity, and humility.

Structure as Root System
Purpose and culture need structures that sustain them. Without governance models, ownership frameworks, and incentive systems that embed and protect stewardship principles, individual stewards risk burnout or co-optation. Structures create the containers within which stewardship can become a collective orientation rather than an individual burden.

When purpose, culture, and structure are woven together in right relation, stewardship becomes not just an aspiration but an embodied reality – fulfilling our responsibilities as a custodian species and tending the systems upon which all life depends.

5. An Economic Perspective on Stewardship

Humanity has come to organise itself predominantly through economic logics. Yet the original meaning of oikonomia was not wealth accumulation, but the careful management and tending of the household. In this sense, stewardship is the forgotten root of economics itself.

Economics was meant to be household management. Yet even that metaphor assumes a household to manage – what if the house is on fire?

Today, our economies operate as if the biosphere were an infinite supplier of resources and sink for waste. An analogy rooted in modernity’s logic can shed light on the predicament in two ways: it reveals the scale of the debt, and it exposes the absurdity of trying to capture life in a ledger. If we were to account for the biosphere’s health in financial terms, we’d see capital depreciation and existential debt to a degree that no financial capital ever could repay. The extraction of fossil fuels generated over millions of years, the rapid clear-cutting of ancient forests, and the mass extinction of species represent not mere “externalities,” but irreversible thefts from future generations and other beings with which we share this planet.

Stewardship invites us to reimagine economics outside the paradigm of growth. It asks:

What would it mean to structure economic activity around the regeneration of life’s capacity to continue?
How might value be defined and shared broadly by what enhances relationships and ecosystems, rather than extracting profits or building power structures for the few?
What if investments were measured not only in financial returns, but in how they restore dignity, soil fertility, health, community cohesion, and ecological resilience?

This may sound like naïve idealism. For me it is a sober assessment of our current predicament. Conventional investing, including most “impact investing”, remains trapped in the belief that start-ups and markets alone can deliver life-affirming outcomes while ensuring high returns. Investing with stewardship principles recognises that care for the commons requires not just capital flow, but a reorientation of purpose, culture, and structure.

At the edges of today’s economic systems, we see emerging movements and enterprises attempting to embody these principles – distributing ownership, embedding long-term purpose into legal structures, and prioritising fair returns over maximum extraction. Stewardship is not about abandoning economic activity. It is about repurposing it as a practice of relational responsibility and regeneration.

6. Why Orient Enterprising Towards Stewardship?

The simplest reason to adopt a stewardship orientation is this:

Because the conditions of life are under strain.

Stewardship reorients economic activity around the nourishment (note 2) of everything it touches. For example, it embeds the principle that profits are a means to purpose rather than an end in themselves, and it curbs self-interest in favour of long-term, shared wellbeing.

In a world structured around short-term returns and narrow investor mindsets, even the most promising endeavours falter. This is where stewardship steps in, calling us back to systemic considerations: How does this activity affect the wider web of life, now and into the future?

With this view, pursuing stewardship through financial investment is not charity. It is a strategic commitment to resilience, dignity, and regeneration. It reduces risks, deepens meaningful value, and offers more stable financial returns precisely because it refuses to prioritise extraction at the expense of collective thriving.

Moreover, financial wealth today has largely been accumulated through practices that favour the needs of capital. Costs are allowed to be externalised onto ecosystems and future generations. And employees are typically not sharing the wealth generated through their work. This invites reflection on how accumulated wealth could be redirected and circulated – towards regenerating the “real capital” that made financial gains possible in the first place – the biosphere and all its interdependent life forms.

7. Investing in Stewardship

With current culture and practices still so dominant, why should enterprise owners and investors choose the path of stewardship? To be honest, there are limited incentives from the inside of the current culture of enterprising and investing. Why should someone “give up” money and power?

Initially, moving towards stewardship carries more the weight of conviction than a rational argument. An entrepreneur or investor is more likely to be interested in stewardship if there is a growing sense that the current system is off or broken, and that dominating thinking can be up for questioning. How one arrives at that point differs, but I have observed that one or several of the dimensions below often are in play.

Moral Obligation
Financial wealth has been allowed to accumulate through legal privileges and accounting models that do not require paying the true price for the enterprise’s impacts. Wealth building has in reality been subsidised by ecosystems, tax schemes and by actively pressing labor costs. As a contrast stewardship honours the debt owed to communities and ecosystems.

Sustaining Value Over Time
Current economic culture favours short-term-ism, power play, cutting corners, and winner takes all. This favours some at the expense of others. Enterprises rooted in stewardship demonstrate long-term governance, purpose orientation, and employee commitment – cultivating resilience as a natural outcome.

Risk Mitigation
Risk is an inevitable aspect of enterprising. The logic is that the higher the risk, the better the potential reward. But is this a healthy long term driver of the economy? And who picks up the tab for the failures? In stewardship oriented enterprising systemic risks are addressed early, which reduces exposure to social, ecological, and governance liabilities. Returns may appear to be lower, but they are more aligned with the rhythms of life.

Alignment of Values and Purpose
Mainstream business is primarily compliance oriented. Laws and rules are followed, reluctantly. Accountability for breaches and mistakes are often deflected. Profits are privatised and losses socialised. With stewardship profits are instead directed towards serving the enterprise’s purpose, not enrich absent owners. As stakeholder expectations gradually shift towards responsibility, care and fairness, stewardship enterprises align better with emerging cultural, political, and moral realities.

8. Examples of Enterprising Based on Stewardship

Truly generative enterprising examples are those where relational responsibility and genuine care reshape purpose and practice. Many of these are emerging from liminal spaces in the economy, where entrepreneurs and investors are deliberately aiming to shift dominant economic logics. Yet, as the following cases show, such efforts are not without their own contradictions – revealing both the possibilities and the limits of stewardship within current systems.

Afforestation and re-wilding initiatives that restore ecosystems, enhance biodiversity, and sequester carbon while supporting local livelihoods. However, these efforts often depend on funding from the very systems they seek to transform, which raises the question: Can restoration be fully disentangled from the logics of extraction? [Read more]
Similarly, community-rooted enterprises building economic resilience by prioritising local needs, circular practices, and cultural integrity. But their resilience depends on a fragile balance – staying rooted in local values while withstanding the pressures of a global economy that privileges scale over care. [Read more]
In another vein, sustainable supply chains replacing extractive and exploitative models with fair labour practices and regenerative sourcing, enhancing long-term viability. Yet even the most ethical supply chains can be co-opted by the markets they seek to change, leaving us to wonder: Is reform enough, or does stewardship demand a deeper transformation? [Read more]
And, ownership structures embedding purpose primacy over shareholder extraction, ensuring profits flow back into serving life. But these models still navigate legal and financial systems built for extraction, forcing us to ask: Are they really a step toward transformation, or just a kinder version of the same? [Read more]

Despite the difficulties—and the contradictions these examples reveal—stewardship is not incompatible with economic activity. In its essence, it is a remembering of what economics could be: the care and tending of our shared household. Yet this remembering is not a destination, but a practice of navigating tensions. It is not a basic human right to build individual wealth by exploiting nature and fellow humans.

9. Making the move

For those creating enterprises, stewardship invites a shift in how success is framed from the outset. It asks not only what problem is being solved, but what conditions are being created – for employees, customers, communities, and the ecosystems within which the enterprise operates.

Stewardship does not diminish ambition. It reframes it – the focus shifts to sufficiency and resilience rather than scale for its own sake. Ownership becomes a responsibility to protect the long-term integrity of the purpose, even as leadership changes. An entrepreneurial path shaped by stewardship involves crafting governance, capital structures, and decision-making processes as containers for the mission during and beyond the founder’s tenure. The central question becomes: how might this enterprise serve not only immediate opportunity, but enduring nourishment of life?

For current business owners, an orientation towards stewardship may begin as a reconsideration of legacy. Beyond financial return or successful exit, what is being handed forward – and to whom? Stewardship brings attention to continuity, culture, and the alignment between declared purpose, stakeholders, and embedded structures.

It invites owners to examine how authority is exercised, the degree to which practices are extractive, how value is distributed, and how accountability is upheld across time. Rather than concentrating power, stewardship often seeks to distribute responsibility in a way that strengthens collective capacity.

The guiding reflection becomes: how can ownership function as care for what has been built, responsibility for what had been degraded – and as protection for what is yet to come?

In supporting an enterprise as an investor, a stewardship orientation challenges prevailing assumptions about risk, return, and control. It raises the question of whether capital is willing to act as a partner in long-term value creation rather than a driver of short-term profit extraction.

Stewardship-informed investment does not abandon financial discipline. It broadens the lens through which value is understood. It recognises that governance, culture, and purpose are not secondary to performance but foundational to durable success.

In this light, the inquiry shifts from “How quickly can monetary value be realised?” to a more creative question “What forms of capital can support enterprises in remaining aligned with their purpose over time – and generate a fair return?”

10. Repurposing Ownership

If stewardship is to thrive, it needs to be embedded structurally, not just culturally or individually. The problem is that the dominant ownership model—the limited liability company—is designed to incentivise extraction and individual gain while limiting accountability.

One alternative gaining traction is steward ownership (note 3). Though the model has existed for a long time, over the past decade it has drawn broader interest. Companies like Zeiss, Novo Nordisk, Patagonia, Bosch, Ecosia, Signal, Buurtzorg, and Carlsberg use it to ensure long-term orientation beyond market volatility and speculative extraction. By embedding stewardship into their very DNA, these organizations make relational responsibility not optional, but inherent.

How does steward ownership achieve this? It rests on two principles, legally enshrined in the enterprise’s governance structure:

Self-Determination
The company cannot become an object of speculation. It remains self-determined and independent in the long term, with control always in the hands of people connected to the company and its mission.

Purpose-Orientation
Profits are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. They serve the company’s mission and development or can fund charitable activities. The value created within the company cannot be extracted by owners for personal benefit.

These principles take form in models like foundation-owned companies and veto-share structures. The model allows for payment of capital costs and often includes innovative financial solutions: investors receive fair, capped returns and typically have limited power, while control remains with the company’s stewards. Founders can also receive capped compensation for their early risk-taking.

The point here isn’t to dive into all the details of steward ownership. It is that ownership matters. Without an aligned structural “DNA,” stewardship is bound to be corrupted. What is pleasing is that there are so many role models to be inspired by. What is frustrating is how little is still known about these alternative models and the success of the enterprises using them.

For those interested in exploring further, steward-ownership.com offers in-depth knowledge on the model.

11. Closing

Approaching stewardship requires us to confront the conditioning, biases, and vested interests that have formed us during modernity. Discomfort is inevitable. The ideas and practices explored here may seem utopian, alien, or impossible within the dominant frames. They might be easy to dismiss, were it not for the mounting evidence that we are destroying the very conditions for life. It takes a special kind of arrogance to continue the destruction, yet that is where we still are.

I’d like to emphasise that stewardship is not about idealism. It is about remembering who we are: deeply entangled participants in the webs of life, carried by ancestors, and accountable to futures beyond our own. This is the orientation I aim to offer here.

My intent with this essay is to venture beyond conventional business and leadership logics, letting go of extraction and control, and embracing long-term relational responsibility. I understand that stewardship isn’t an easy sell in mainstream culture. But my ambition isn’t to convince – only to offer my observations, learnings, and practices as one thread in a larger weave. I’m inspired by those crossing thresholds into the liminal spaces of the “not yet”. They are my unsung role models.

I am happy I found stewardship, and that it found me. It has restored my optimism around entrepreneurship and business—and the possibility of contributing to the nourishment of life.

Thank you for reading. I welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions.

— Jan

Notes

The principle of right relation is not a moral compass or a perfectionist orientation. Rather, it is a practice of being in integrity with the world. It means recognizing that we are never separate from what we affect, never untouched by what we ignore, and never superior to the living systems we are intertwined with.
To be in right relation is to understand that how we move through existence matters. The quality of our presence, attention, and care shapes our actions and the choices we make. This does not mean we will always do what is right. But we approach systems we do not understand, and cannot control, with humility. We listen and observe rather than controlling and dictating. We repair harm when it occurs, even when responsibility could be avoided.
Right relation also demands that we acknowledge asymmetry: of power, privilege, and influence – and take responsibility without being driven by guilt or a saviour complex. In right relation, perfection is impossible. We constantly make mistakes and misjudgments. What matters is showing up, staying with the difficulty, remaining open to what wants to emerge, and not resisting our own inner transformation.
Right relation extends far beyond our human relationships. It may sound poetic, but being in right relation also means asking: What does the Earth need from me? How is systemic and generational context affecting me and others? What is my responsibility to the future generations I will never meet? How do I honor the more-than-human lives intertwined with my own?
For more on the principle of right relation please read Tyson Yunkaporta or Vanessa Andreotti.
Interestingly the Swedish term for the business sector is “näringsliv”, which literally means the nourishment of life.
Read here about what steward ownership is.