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Citizen Infrastructure

More-than-human governance

Almost every system of government we have is built for, and by, humans. Yet our decisions constantly affect creatures and systems that have no say in them — the fish in a sea we pollute, the forest we log, the river we divert. More-than-human governance (also called multispecies governance) asks a simple, radical question: what would it take to give those non-human lives a genuine voice in the decisions that shape them?

It’s closely related to the rights of nature movement — the legal idea that a river or an ecosystem can hold rights of its own — but it’s broader: it’s about representation and participation, not only legal standing.

Why the nation state struggles with it

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Ecological problems cross borders and species, but we mostly govern them one nation at a time. A government is accountable to its voters; its voters are (at most) accountable to one another — not to the wider web of life, and not to future generations of humans or non-humans. So the interests of everything that can’t vote get systematically sidelined. This is the same gap that deliberation as enfranchisement points to within the human world, pushed one boundary further out.

Early experiments (“green shoots”)

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These ideas can sound like science fiction — until you notice they’re already being tried, at small scale:

  • The Embassy of the North Sea treats a sea as a political actor, and is learning to listen to — then speak for — its inhabitants.
  • Interspecies money gives animals a digital wallet and a human trustee, so that protecting them pays the people who live alongside them.
  • Speculative work imagines ecosystem assemblies that could represent a bioregion like the Amazon.
  • Advances in AI decoding of animal communication — most famously whale song — hint at new ways to infer what other species might actually “want.”
  • The Berggruen Institute’s Multispecies Constitution Project asks what a constitution that included non-humans would even look like.

The people behind these are clear-eyed: most early experiments will fail, and none will spread overnight. But, as Jonathan Blake puts it, the point is that they “are happening in the present” — green shoots that inspire others to try, tweak, or reject and improve.

Three ways to do it

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Surveying these European experiments (the term more-than-human was coined by the ecologist David Abram, to stress that humans are part of, not above, the animate earth), DemocracyNext and Arising Quo found practitioners clustering into three broad approaches:

  • Rights-based — giving nature legal standing, so a river or forest can hold rights of its own (the rights of nature tradition).
  • Representation-focused — building ways for non-human interests to be spoken for in decisions, through guardians, trustees, or assemblies.
  • Artistic — using art, ritual, and imagination to shift how people perceive and relate to the living world, on the view that governance follows from a felt sense of connection.

The honest caution from the practitioners themselves: the field risks elitism, and most urgently needs the voices it tends to leave out — especially Indigenous perspectives, which have governed in relation with the more-than-human for millennia and are too often treated as an afterthought rather than a foundation.

Why it’s here

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More-than-human governance is one of the most concrete frontiers of planetary governance, and it rhymes with ideas already in this wiki: the OntoShift from seeing ourselves as separate individuals to seeing ourselves as part of an interdependent web, and relational property, which already treats ownership as a set of negotiated relationships rather than absolute control. Extending a voice to the more-than-human world is the same instinct, applied to governance.

Sources

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