8 Forms of Capital is a framework by Ethan Roland Soloviev and Gregory Landua, first published in 2011, that maps eight kinds of wealth flowing through any enterprise or community, so that money is seen as one form among many.
The eight forms are social, material, financial, living, intellectual, experiential (or human), spiritual, and cultural capital. Living capital is the animals, plants, water, and soil that form the basis of life; material capital is non-living physical objects such as stone, metal, and timber; experiential capital is the capacity gained by actually doing the work, from organizing a community project to building a strawbale house. Roland describes it as a lens rather than a model, a way to observe how value moves and accumulates.
The framework came out of 📝Permaculture, where it gave designers language to argue for the value of healthy soil and healthy communities inside capitalist decision-making. Roland and Landua expanded it into the 2013 book 📝Regenerative Enterprise, which uses the eight forms to define regeneration, resilience, and sustainability for businesses.
It is a sibling of the six 📝Types of Capital drawn from 📝Charles Eisenstein's 📝The Ascent of Humanity, not a superset of them. The two split the world differently: the eight forms divide nature into living and material capital and add experiential capital, while the six types keep a single 📝natural capital and fold lived experience into intellectual and 📝spiritual capital.
We account in the six types, not the eight. An earlier pass at our core context swapped this list in for our own, and these two frameworks are easy to conflate; this memo exists to keep them distinct.