We interpret the potential of natural capital productivity in a spatial ecological social economic system (ESES) as the stock of free energy. According to the definition of entropy flow in an open system, the «negative entropy» inflow occurs into the Earth’s biosphere, with the sustainability of the negentropic budget maintaining the living matter mass conservation law posited by Volodymyr Vernadsky. Introduction of spatial heterogeneity into the free energy definition reveals the non-additive property of its volume across spatial subsystems of the biosphere. This further emphasizes the conceptual shortcomings of stakeholder-centric and property-based sustainability decision-making models. Instead, trajectories of system’s dynamics on different scales should become the subject of preventive decision-making and risk management by economic agents and regional stakeholders, acting in a multi-layered communication and coordination network with horizontal as well as hierarchical information and resource flows. The case of the Carpathian region is used to illustrate the substantive necessity and institutional prerequisites of a new spatial model for sustainable development. 

natural capital, spatial ecological social economic systems, free energy, negentropy, preventive governance for sustainability