I'm Adar Zehavi. I developed a grammar of self-organizing capacities that makes the tacit knowledge embedded in socioecological movements legible. Once learned and practiced, it reshapes how collective action is understood and evaluated.
Resources can initiate regeneration. This project explores the conditions under which regeneration lasts.
Moving from managing outcomes to designing conditions for regeneration.
My work is to locate where an initiative sits and name what would move it.
The power of lived experience and tacit knowledge
I grew up with two accounts of the same history. My grandmother spoke from lived experience; my state taught a pedagogy of collective catastrophe. Her life-history predicted my social future more accurately, which led me to ask —
How do people find their own path to safety when the institutions meant to protect them turn against them?
I found the information I was looking for in the recorded life histories of those who lived to tell them. Their stories became the path I kept following.
The grammar of self-organization grew from that lifelong search for safety, a decade of inquiry, and one recurring observation: the successful cases shared the same pattern.
Berlin Britz, 1936
Democratizing the archives, with a language model and the people who read them.
Consensus Lab grew from a simple curiosity: could a language model recognize a shared self-organizing pattern across two archives no scholarship had connected?
The short answer is yes.
Computed consensus as the knowledge product
While debates about AI run in every direction, this project keeps the archive open to interpretation, so that lived experience can shape our shared future.
A purpose-built annotation tool lets readers mark the grammar they identify in the excerpts. A computed-consensus tool compares the readings of experts and peers. The gap between them is the knowledge product others can trust and build from. A second model learns to recognize the pattern in any published account of people organizing to meet a shared goal, identifying self-organization at a scale no single researcher could reach.
Living currencies for socioecological systems
From ossified archives to socioecological movements, Vivarium explores how tacit knowledge can be transformed into governable, revenue-generating systems through decentralized, consensus-based technologies.
In collaboration with:
The project is a participatory theory-to-practice research process composed of six gated phases. It aims to root technical infrastructure in the lived experience of members of socioecological movements. It enables system developers to encode governance logic and socioecological values into that infrastructure. It provides financial actors with evidence that deployed capital generates economic, social, and ecological surplus.
Image: GBM, Chuka Forest in Meru County, April 2025
The Green Belt Movement, founded by the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai. A women-led network of tree nurseries that has planted more than 51 million trees across Kenya's watersheds.
Tarun Bharat Sangh, led by Stockholm Water Prize laureate Dr. Rajendra Singh. A water-harvesting network that has rejuvenated 13 rivers across more than 1,000 villages.
Image: TBS Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, May 2026
Narrative Foraging
A field methodology that reads the structural grammar of self-organization from life-history interviews. It surfaces narrative evidence of self-organizing dynamics and traces how abstract concepts such as novelty, autonomy, anticipation, and synergy are expressed in local terms.
Figure 1: Tarun Bharat Sangh: 95 excerpts
Figure 2: The Green Belt Movement: 306 excerpts
Units of change, such as a registered nursery, a public school, or a restaurant, function as boundary-maintaining cells in which social capital, ecological knowledge, labor, and symbolic meaning converge into a coherent structure capable of reproducing the movement's vision-aligned goals.
Figure 3: The Village Water Council as Tarun Bharat Sangh’s unit of change
Figure 4: Over time, the depleted river becomes a locally governed asset, demonstrating durable regeneration.
Self-organizing movements scale at the pace of social learning. As cultural capital propagates to nearby villages, the same governance logic takes root at each new site, allowing the movement to scale fractally and coordination to grow without losing local autonomy or coherence.
Moving from narratives to numbers: scaling participation up to 100 and developing metrics that local communities value and can track independently.
An open society that coordinates through persuasion and consensus
Studying self-organization in the field, to build social systems that live.
