Creating transitions pathways with CO_

The Gulf of California faces interconnected challenges across food production, fisheries, tourism, conservation, water management, and coastal development. While many promising initiatives exist, they often operate in isolation and struggle to influence the systems that drive environmental degradation and social inequity. The challenge is not to fund more projects, but to create the conditions for transformative change at a regional scale. To address this challenge, we used a Deep Transitions approach focused on the development of a transition bundle. A transition bundle is a dynamic and evolving coalition of actors, initiatives, investments, policies, and learning processes that collectively support one or more transition pathways. Rather than scaling isolated and individual solutions, transition bundles connect complementary initiatives and actors around shared visions of the future.
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The Gulf of California Bioregional Platform is the vehicle to orchestrate the transition bundle. Launched in November 2025 through a collaboration between iAlumbra Philanthropy and CO_, the Platform operates through three interconnected pillars (knowledge, collective action plan and blended finance) that work together to accelerate the regenerative economy. By establishing common goals, providing a framework for collective action, and coordinating mixed capital deployment, the Platform addresses the core challenge that has prevented transformation: the lack of an orchestrating mechanism that can align multiple actors, funding sources, and interventions toward coherent systemic change.
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The experiment focused on four interconnected socio- technical systems (as well as their couplings with other systems) that play a critical role in shaping the future of the Gulf of California:

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• Food systems (land and sea)
• Tourism and recreation
• Coastal development and real estate
• Ocean conservation

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The experiment provided a conceptual framework and analytical toolkit for designing a transition bundle that enables multisystem change in the Gulf of California while supporting transformative investment strategies aligned with pathways co-developed by diverse bioregional stakeholders. The experiment aimed to answer the question: How can investment, governance, and collective action be aligned to accelerate a regenerative transition across the Gulf of California?

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Click download to read the full case study.

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