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Citizen Infrastructure

The Embassy of the North Sea (Netherlands)

Most environmental politics speaks about the sea. The Embassy of the North Sea, founded in The Hague in 2018, tries to speak with it — and eventually for it.

”The sea owns itself”

Section titled “”The sea owns itself””

The Embassy starts from a deceptively simple principle: the sea owns itself. From there it works to involve “the voices of plants, animals, microbes, and people in and around the North Sea” in political life. Its argument is that today’s ecological crises “transcend borders and species, yet we mostly approach them from the nation-state perspective” — and that non-human life is badly under-represented in our democracies, jeopardising future humans and non-humans alike.

A long-range plan

Section titled “A long-range plan”

The Embassy has plotted a deliberate route: first listen to the sea, then learn to speak with it, and finally negotiate on behalf of the North Sea and all the life it holds. Along the way it is investigating a concrete legal question — could the North Sea be recognised as an independent legal entity, the way some rivers now are?

It grew out of The Parliament of Things, a speculative research project inspired by the philosopher Bruno Latour, exploring what it would mean to “emancipate” animals, plants and things as political participants.

Why it’s a story worth knowing

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The Embassy turns the abstract idea of more-than-human governance into an actual practice — with a team, a plan, and public events. It’s a vivid example of what planetary governance looks like when it comes down to one specific place, and of the OntoShift — from treating nature as a resource to treating it as a relationship — made real. It was featured as one of the ten cases in the Berggruen Institute and Dark Matter Labs’ Planetary Compendium.

Sources

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