A regional ecology is the unit of analysis for the regional studies: an actual society read as a structure of institutional functions, never as the personality of a people. The distinction is what makes the observations examinable rather than stereotyping — the object is always an arrangement (“these institutions grant limited jurisdiction to independent interior signal”), not a trait (“these people are like this”).
Two ideas do most of the work. The first is that a deficit usually emerges from a strength — an ecology superb at one function has often underdeveloped its opposite — so the analysis begins with what a society does exceptionally well. The second is the compensating mechanism: a weak function rarely means collapse, because something else carries the load — coordination in place of interior signal, imported innovation in place of unauthorized novelty, private wealth in place of a public floor — and finding that substitute reveals more about the real ecology than the deficit alone. Both are read across a set of qualitative dimensions with no total score, because the profile itself is the information.