Learning Session 3: Interspecies Councils
Online learning sessions using dialogue to explore the workings, developments, (im)possibilities, and emerging insights of diverse approaches and praxes for Co-creation with the More-than-Human world
Image: Hackney Interspecies Council (June 2024), House of Hackney
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This 3rd learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in May 2025 explored the practice of Interspecies Councils with Louise Romain from Moral Imaginations.
Moral Imaginations’ body of work aims to cultivate imagination on behalf of the welfare of the whole, bringing the voices of future generations, the more-than-human world and deep time ancestors into culture, organisations and decision making.
The focus of the session was on how such councils are set up, how they function in practice, and what they make possible in contexts such as governance, land use, and organisational decision-making.
What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.
🌿Learning Session 3 (May 2025) — Synthesis
Interspecies Councils, with Louise Romain (Moral Imaginations)
How do you bring more-than-human perspectives into a room in a way that is structured enough to inform real decisions, without reducing those perspectives to simplistic or symbolic inputs?
1. What are Interspecies Councils?
A more-than-human citizens’ assembly
Interspecies Councils are democratic decision-making structures that introduce the perspectives of species, ecosystems, and landscapes into governance and policy processes, positioning them as participants rather than external considerations.
Developed as a contemporary governance practice
The approach was developed by Phoebe Tickell in 2021 as part of the Moral Imaginations work, building on earlier practices while explicitly orienting them toward real-world decision-making contexts.
From ritual to governance application
They draw on the Council of All Beings, originally developed by Joanna Macy and John Seed, translating this from its original context of ecological awareness and grief work into a structured format that can inform organisational and policy processes.
Representation through situated role-play
Participants take on the role of specific beings—such as rivers, animals, or ecosystems—and deliberate from those perspectives, using a combination of factual grounding, contextual knowledge, and informed imagination.
Structured, yet open-ended process
The councils are guided by facilitation, real-world issues, and clear stages, while allowing space for interpretation, emergence, and dialogue across perspectives.
Expanding the scope of decision-making
By bringing more-than-human perspectives into the room, the process shifts not only outcomes, but also how decisions are framed, what is considered relevant, and whose interests are taken into account.
🌱 Seed:
Interspecies Councils extend democracy beyond the human—while making visible the limits of representation itself.
2. How does an Interspecies Council actually work in practice?
Preparation determines whether the council produces anything meaningful
Participants take on a specific more-than-human entity and are expected to build a grounded understanding of it—its behaviour, dependencies, seasonal rhythms, and ecological role. When this preparation is superficial, participants tend to rely on assumptions or generic narratives; when it is done well, the perspectives brought into the room become far more specific and consequential.
The council is a facilitated, role-based dialogue—not an open conversation
During the session, participants speak from the perspective of the entity they represent, within a structure that ensures each voice is heard and that the discussion does not revert to a standard human-only exchange. What emerges is not a unified “voice of nature,” but a set of perspectives that often reveal tensions within ecosystems themselves.
Outputs require translation into decision-making contexts
The council itself does not make decisions. Its value depends on how insights are captured and carried forward into policy, design, or organisational processes, where they can actually influence outcomes.
📌 Practitioner takeaway:
Without rigorous preparation and a clear pathway into decision-making, the council risks becoming performative rather than impactful.
3. What does this practice do to participants?
It shifts engagement from abstract concern to situated understanding
Participants move from speaking about “nature” in general terms to grappling with the specific conditions and constraints of a particular species or ecosystem.
It surfaces constraints that are usually excluded from decisions
Factors such as timing, habitat requirements, and interdependencies become harder to ignore once they are articulated from within the system itself.
It changes what feels negotiable
What might initially be approached as a trade-off can become less flexible when the consequences for specific ecosystems are made explicit.
🌱 Seed:
The council does not just add perspectives—it reshapes what participants recognise as real and non-negotiable.
4. Where and when is this approach useful?
In contexts where ecological impact is present but not structurally represented
This includes land use planning, infrastructure, environmental policy, and organisational strategy, where ecosystems are affected but not directly included in decision-making.
When the framing of the decision itself needs to be challenged
Interspecies Councils are most valuable when the question is not how to optimise a decision, but whether its starting assumptions hold.
As a way to move beyond impact mitigation
Rather than focusing on reducing harm, the process can surface whether and under what conditions an intervention should proceed at all.
🌱 Seed:
This is not about improving decisions at the margins—it is about questioning whether the decision should be made in its current form.
5. What does it take to organise an Interspecies Council?
Scoping which perspectives need to be present
Relevant species or ecosystems are identified based on the context, rather than selected arbitrarily.
Ensuring participants are properly equipped
Access to ecological data, local knowledge, or expert input is critical for grounding the perspectives represented.
Facilitation as a form of discipline
The facilitator maintains role clarity, ensures the structure is followed, and guides how insights are captured.
Designing for what happens after
Without a clear pathway into decision-making, the outputs of the council remain disconnected from the context they were meant to influence.
📌 Practitioner takeaway:
Running a council is less about convening a session and more about designing a process that connects preparation, dialogue, and decision-making.
6. How do you deal with conflicting needs between species?
Conflicts become more concrete, not less
Different species or ecosystems may have competing needs, which are surfaced more explicitly through the council.
Limits become visible
Rather than smoothing over tensions, the process highlights where certain impacts cannot simply be balanced or traded off.
Decision-making shifts accordingly
This can lead to different decisions—or to questioning whether a proposed course of action should proceed at all.
🌱 Seed:
Including more-than-human perspectives does not resolve conflict—it reveals where real limits lie.
Cross-cutting insight threads
Across the session, several deeper shifts became visible.
Impact assessment → Decision reframing
The process shifts from evaluating impacts after the fact to questioning the basis on which decisions are made.
Abstract nature → Situated ecosystems
Generic references to “nature” are replaced by specific, context-bound perspectives.
Discussion → Deliberation with consequences
The council is not only exploratory; it is intended to inform decisions, even if integration remains challenging.
Inclusion → Uptake (unresolved)
Including more-than-human perspectives is possible in a structured way; ensuring they influence final decisions remains an open challenge.
For those interested in exploring this practice further—including resources, case studies, and the evolving body of work around Interspecies Councils—please visit Moral Imagination’s website and the online hub.
Closing
These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.
Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.
The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.
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