Culture, Humanity and the Roots of a Regenerative Economy

BLOG by Edina Csányi, European Investment Bank

For much of my professional life, I worked with things you can see: railways, energy systems, water infrastructure

(and savin the Danube sturgeon). Financial structures. Large investments that appear on maps, in spreadsheets and eventually — if all goes well — in the real world.

There is something wonderfully reassuring about physical infrastructure, isn’t there? You can point to it. Even photograph it. You can measure whether it works.

But, after almost two decades around banking, finance and infrastructure, I have become increasingly interested in something much harder to see: what actually makes these systems work?

And again and again, I come back to people:

A technically excellent project can still fail if institutions do not trust one another. A brilliant strategy does not travel very far without people willing to champion it. A community with strong physical infrastructure can still be fragile if people are isolated, distrustful or unable to organise when something goes wrong.

Some of the most important infrastructure around us, in other words, may be invisible.

Trust. Relationships. Knowledge. Imagination. Culture. A sense of belonging. The ability to cooperate with people who are not exactly like us.

I have started thinking of these as part of our human infrastructure.

And this is where regenerative capitalism becomes very interesting to me: because, if we talk about regeneration, what exactly are we trying to regenerate?

Nature? Certainly.

But perhaps also communities, institutions, trust, human capability. Our relationship with one another. And maybe even our understanding of what an economy is for.

We have become extraordinarily sophisticated at investing in things. We measure GDP, productivity, capital expenditure, financial returns, kilometres of railway and megawatts of energy, you name it.

All important.

But we are much less comfortable with things that are difficult to count:

How much trust exists in a community?How easily can people cooperate across institutions?Do young people feel they have agency over their future?Do people have the imagination to conceive of something better?Do they feel connected to the place and society around them?

And here I have a slight discomfort with our instinct to measure everything.

I work in finance -of course I believe in measurement. :)

But does something have to be monetised before we allow ourselves to say that it matters?

Culture is a good example: we often speak about music, literature, theatre, film and the arts as things that a prosperous economy can afford once the serious economic work has been done.

I sometimes wonder whether we have this backwards.

Culture teaches us to understand people we have never met. To inhabit another person's reality for a while. To recognise ambiguity. To imagine worlds that do not yet exist.Those are not particularly soft skills. They are rather useful capacities if you are trying to negotiate, innovate, lead, cooperate across borders — or live peacefully in a complicated society.

I have seen something similar throughout my career: the projects that moved forward were rarely moved by technical structures alone. They had people behind them who built relationships, crossed institutional boundaries and kept going when the formal machinery was not enough.

Often, what allowed those people to connect was not another procedure.

It was shared language in the broadest sense: culture, humour, curiosity, values, human recognition.

This is also why I have become fascinated by the idea of what I started calling social neuroplasticity:

Our brains become more adaptable by forming and strengthening connections. Perhaps societies do too?

The more meaningful connections we have — particularly across groups that would not otherwise meet — the greater our ability to learn, adapt and reorganise when circumstances change.

And that brings us to Europe:

We spend a great deal of time asking how Europe can compete. Can we mobilise capital faster? Innovate faster? Regulate better? Produce more cheaply?

These are important questions.

But, Europe also possesses extraordinary cultural and institutional inheritance: centuries of literature, music, philosophy and art; universities and public institutions; traditions of social dialogue; ideas about dignity, solidarity and the relationship between markets and society.

That inheritance is not automatically an economic advantage.Heritage is only an advantage if we actually use it.

Europe can have Bach, Bartók, Dante, Shakespeare, extraordinary universities and magnificent cultural institutions — and still fail to renew itself.

So perhaps the question is: what could these roots enable us to build now?

Could our understanding of human dignity influence the kinds of companies we create? Could culture become part of how we educate future business leaders, rather than something they encounter after the “serious” subjects?

Could investment decisions pay more attention to the capacities they leave behind — skills, trust, participation, institutional strength — rather than only the outputs they finance? Could we become better at investing not simply for people, but in people's ability to act, adapt, create and participate?

There is, of course, a danger here:

The moment we discover that trust, culture or wellbeing have economic value, finance has an understandable temptation to turn them into another metric. I am not sure we should. Not everything that matters needs a price tag.

But neither should we accept that because something is difficult to measure, it belongs somewhere outside the serious economy.

Perhaps regenerative capitalism requires us to become more comfortable holding both ideas at once:

Humanity has economic value – and, humanity is valuable beyond economics.

For me, this is ultimately what our CEE4Impact conversation is about.

Not whether Europe should choose culture and humanity instead of competitiveness.

But whether we have underestimated the extent to which they might be part of what makes societies — and economies — resilient, creative and capable of renewal in the first place.

So the question I would like to leave open is this one:

If we genuinely believed that human and cultural capacity were infrastructure, what would we start investing in differently tomorrow?

That is the conversation I am very much looking forward to having, with my three excellent co-panellists on stage.

JOIN US AT CEE4IMPACT DAY ON THE 8TH OCTOBER!