Modern democratic systems were designed around specific imaginaries of the political world: individuals represented as citizens, interests aggregated through elections and deliberation, and governance embedded within economic systems organised around industrial growth. These frameworks helped expand participation and rights over time, while gradually recognising broader obligations, protections, and relationships that extend beyond immediate electoral interests. Yet the underlying structures of democratic governance remained largely organised around human-centred, territorially bounded, and growth-oriented assumptions, rather than the deeply interconnected social, cultural, and ecological systems that shape life on Earth.Today, democratic systems face growing pressures that reveal the limits of these inherited frameworks. Across many societies, declining trust in institutions, voter suppression and unequal political participation, communities feeling unheard, ecological systems under strain, and decisions affecting future generations being made without their meaningful consideration all point toward widening tensions within existing democratic models.
More-than-human thinking opens a deeper question about democracy itself. If democratic life emerges through complex relationships between humans, more-than-human beings, ecosystems, and future generations, how might democratic institutions and our understanding of political communities evolve to recognise and govern through these relationships? Bringing together democratic innovation and more-than-human governance helps explore this possibility. Around the world, emerging alternatives such as multi-species assemblies, rights of nature initiatives, longstanding Indigenous governance traditions (including, for example, the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council), and ecological guardianship councils suggest that democracy may need to move beyond simply expanding participation toward transforming how relationships between humans and the living world are recognised, and supported within governance systems.
Drawing on a dialogue convened by Claudia Fernandez de Cordoba in collaboration with Living Imaginaries and the Centre for Deliberative Democracy, this piece brings together perspectives from scholars and practitioners across these domains to argue that reimagining democracy requires moving beyond representation toward more relational forms of governance. A key challenge to dominant democratic models of representation comes from Indigenous relational perspectives, as articulated by Andraya Stapp. Andraya (Ngāti Porou, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui) is a Māori-Dutch researcher who navigates the complexities of growing up ‘off country’ and the fragmentation of ancestral knowledge caused by family migration. Her research establishes ethical pedagogies at the ‘Cultural Interface’ (Nakata 2007), a reconciling aggregate narrative of Māori, Aboriginal, and Western Feminist Multispecies knowledges. Grounded in whakapapa (layers of connection, lineage) and guided by her whanau (family), including more-than-human kin, she operates from a reciprocal obligation to care for the mana (dignity/integrity) and wairua (spirit) of the entities of the more-than-human world.
Drawing on whakapapa, and the Australian Aboriginal concept of Kinship-mind (Yunkaporta 2019), Andraya positioned herself as deeply embedded in relationships of responsibility with peoples, places, knowledges, objects and the more-than-human. She problematised Western representations that presume distance, hierarchy, and linear time, and attended to the tension and balance of her own intra-actions in webs of connection. This responsibility is enacted through place-based storying. Place -based storying in this definition refers to forming a profound relational understanding with place over time. It means listening deeply and with humility to the stories that place (and all the entities of place) share. It also implies a reciprocal obligation of care that must be ongoing for the relationship to continue. This requires respecting the stories of place and not using them for extractive purposes or self-interest. It also engenders responsibility for the ongoingness of place. While storying shifts according to context, and can function as a governance structure (e.g., when First Nations peoples formally meet to extrapolate a solution to a problem due to their systems knowledge and respect for place as kin), Andraya utilises it as a system for generating, transmitting, adapting, and storing knowledge collectively with human and more-than-human beings. In this methodology, relationships themselves serve as a literature review. By weaving elements of sacred Māori funerary rituals, she textures death with lament and memory, ensuring the task of storying remains an ongoing responsibility to both the living and the dead. Andraya troubles Western theories of relatedness that overlook or ignore First Nations ontologies of relationality, or extract from them without engaging deeply and respectfully with their ideas and values. In her opinion, this runs the risk of continuing the colonising project.
A second line of critique challenges the assumption that democratic progresses are shaped through expanding inclusion, as highlighted in the work of Hans Asenbaum. In the history of democracy, new groups have gradually been added into existing institutional frameworks: first non-property holding men, then women, and other marginalised communities. The temptation today is to extend that logic and simply add nonhuman beings into the same institutional settings. Asenbaum argued that this risks assimilation rather than transformation. Drawing on new materialism and assemblage theory, which emphasise the relational and co-constitutive character of humans and nonhumans, he suggested that the idea of stable subjects representing stable objects is flawed. Humans and nonhumans are constantly reconfiguring assemblages that co-produce one another. From this perspective, the challenge is not to include nature within existing democratic structures but to transform democracy itself. Recognising our own more-than-human entanglements – from microbiomes to air, food, and ecological systems – opens the possibility of democratic practices grounded in relational becoming. Rather than imagining democracy as negotiation between already-formed human subjects, this perspective understands democratic life as emerging through ongoing relations of interdependence, vulnerability, and co-creation with human and nonhuman others. Democracy, in this sense, becomes less about incorporating external “others” into fixed institutions and more about cultivating forms of collective responsiveness attentive to the dynamic assemblages through which political life is constituted.
These more theoretical critiques are grounded in lived governance practices, as illustrated by Fern Hames’ work with the Corop Wetlands Cultural Waterscape on Taungurung Country. Drawing from ecological science and Taungurung knowledge, she emphasised relationality and porous, open boundaries between beings. Such boundaries are places of relationship, exchange and interaction. For example, estuaries or ecological transition zones demonstrate how life, knowledge and new contexts emerge through interaction and exchange, rather than separation. For Fern, governance begins with recognising these relationships and responding to them. The Corop project is an example of governing “with Country,” where decision-making begins by listening to the needs of the landscape itself. Through long-term collaboration between Taungurung Traditional Owners, government agencies, and local communities, the project aims to restore wetlands as living cultural landscapes. This approach reframes governance from managing nature as a resource to sustaining relationships with Country across generations. The Corop program operates a formal governance structure bringing together diverse partners, and regularly reviews and affirms decisions and progress through a cultural governance framework. Parallel, and connected, governance systems operate. Government agency representatives, local community leaders, and staff from the Taungurung Land and Waters Council (TLaWC), regularly come together in an authorising Strategic Leadership Group (SLG), and in themed Working Groups. Advice from the Working Groups informs the SLG discussions and decisions. At the same time, cultural processes by Taungurung people on Country continually weave in and out of the SLG and the Working Groups. These cultural governance processes, facilitated by TlaWC staff, create foundational, guiding documents and voices, such as the Country Speaks Statements, which underpin all the Corop program’s work. To achieve reform in planning for, managing, and living in reciprocity with Country, the program explores multiple levers for transformation, including legislative reform, societal change, and the tangible demonstration of possibility. The different levers are explored through partner participation in Taungurung cultural experiences, to widen perspectives and nurture ways of connecting with place, and through the three Working Groups. The Institutional Working Group explores legislative and regulatory reforms toward the 100-year Corop vision. The Livelihoods Working Group researches the socio-economic dimensions of the Corop landscape, including the hopes and challenges expressed by local communities. The Biocultural and Environmental Working Group collates biophysical and biocultural understandings of the waterscape and explores approaches to restoring healthy Country. The three Working Groups come together for shared exploration of common issues. A program of onground actions, and the visible practices of a holistic, partnership approach, demonstrate what is possible, and drive inspiration, growing engagement, and advocacy.
At the same time, relational approaches raise complex epistemic, ethical and institutional challenges, as explored in the work of Danielle Celermajer. Through the story of caring for a dying sheep in the multispecies community where she lives, she illustrated the difficulty of acting responsibly toward other beings whose experiences remain fundamentally opaque to us. The move towards relationality must, in this sense, be complemented by a radical humility of not fully knowing – especially given histories of humans in western modernity casting others as objects of transparent objective knowledge. Further, these ethical dilemmas do not occur in a neutral context but within institutions shaped by colonial capitalism and the material conditions it has produced. These conditions cannot be magically undone, and so alongside the more radical imaginaries, we need strategies for recalibrating power and creating the conditions for Earth others to show up as subjects of justice. Institutionalising multispecies justice therefore requires working on two fronts: responding ethically within existing relationships while also confronting the political and economic structures that stabilise extractive human dominance over the more-than-human world. This means being willing to experiment and tarry with not knowing how to transform institutions and doing so imperfectly, while staying open to radical and unanticipated possibilities.
Legal innovations illustrate both the possibilities and limits of bringing more-than-human perspectives into governance, as examined by Erin O’Donnell. Her work explores the implications of recognising rivers and ecosystems as legal subjects rather than objects. While rights of nature can strengthen ecological protection, they are implemented through existing institutions, and can reproduce existing inequalities, particularly where environmental protections disproportionately affect already marginalised communities. In response, O’Donnell reframes representation as a spectrum: speaking about nature, speaking for nature, and speaking with nature. The latter marks a significant shift. Rather than assuming that humans can determine and represent nature’s interests, ‘speaking with’ is grounded in an ongoing, place-based relationship through which representatives learn to interpret and respond to the will and preferences of ecosystems. A key example is the work of the Birrarung Council, the voice of the Birrarung (Yarra River), the first and so far only river to be recognised as a living entity in setter colonial law in Australia. The Birrarung Council works with relevant government agencies and local governments to help them develop their own relationships with Birrarung as a living being rather than a resource they manage. Crucially, this is not a single voice speaking on behalf of nature, but a process that enables a dialogue of knowledges, where different actors are brought into relationship with the ecosystem itself. In this sense, representation becomes less about speaking for, and more about facilitating relational engagement, where governance emerges through listening, interpretation, and negotiation. In settler colonial societies, this process must be led by Indigenous Peoples. O’Donnell suggests that democracy may be strengthened when it creates space for deliberation that is attentive to more-than-human worlds, even in the absence of certainty.
Taken together, these perspectives do not converge into a single model, but point toward a plural field of emerging approaches to governance. What unites them is a shared recognition that the future of democracy depends on reimagining the imaginaries on which it is built. The hope that emerges here does not lie in a single solution, but in the possibility of building democratic systems grounded in different ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to the world. As the speakers showed, these imaginaries will be shaped by specific histories, ecologies, and communities. Yet across these differences, a clear shift is underway. Reimagining democracy is not about extending existing systems, but about transforming their foundations. Rather than organising politics around representation and control, these approaches point toward governance grounded in relationships, reciprocity, responsibility, and ongoing negotiation between different ways of being and knowing. In this sense, more-than-human democracy is not a fixed model, but a direction of travel. In a time defined by overlapping crises, it suggests that the work of governing otherwise has already begun.
References
Asenbaum, Hans, Amanda Machin, Jean-Paul Gagnon, Diana Leong, Melissa Orlie, and James Louis Smith. 2023. ‘The Nonhuman Condition: Radical Democracy through New Materialist Lenses’. Contemporary Political Theory 22 (4): 584–615. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00635-3.
Birrarung Council. (2025). Annual Report to Parliament on the Implementation of Burndap Birrarung Burndap Umarkoo. State Government Victoria. https://www.birrarungcouncil.vic.gov.au/annual-report-2025
Cano-Pecharroman, Lidia, and Erin O’Donnell. 2024. ‘Relational Representation: Speaking with and Not about Nature’. PLOS Water 3 (10): e0000236. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000236.
Celermajer, Danielle, Anthony Burke, Stefanie Fishel, et al. 2025. Institutionalising Multispecies Justice. 1st edn. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009506243.
Nakata, Martin. 2007. ‘The Cultural Interface’. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education. 36:7-14. 10.1017/S1326011100004646.
Reed, G., Brunet, N. D., Longboat, S., & Natcher, D. C. 2021. ‘Indigenous guardians as an emerging approach to indigenous environmental governance’. Conservation Biology, 35(1):179–189. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13532
Yunkaporta, Tyson. 2019. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World. Melbourne: Text Publishing.
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