In our Reframes, we step back from the Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues to read the broader landscape — examining what is taking shape in the field of co-creation with the More-than-Human world, where thinking is advancing, where gaps and challenges keep (re)surfacing, and where the field might benefit from focused perspectives, fresh connections, and deep cross-pollination.
Our second Reframe (full article here) sets out a proposition for a Biocratic Governance mechanism that would act as a generative and foundational layer - aligning the decision and design logic of local governance with “land speaks first”, versus land and nature as a constraint applied along the way or even afterwards. We lay out a strawman - a 4-step practical approach - to turn the concept into an adaptable, minimum viable prototype for testing in real world conditions and exposing its frictions. Here we provide a concise synopsis of Reframe 2.
The absent instrument
We’ve reached the point where we can see the limitations of asking nature and the more-than-human to inform governance without changing the epistemological and procedural basis from which governance operates. Many have come to similar conclusions, although what’s still absent in most jurisdictions is a governance instrument that makes the living system the starting point of local decision-making.
Land speaks first
The question is not whether a municipality, council or waterboard considers the land alongside other factors when making a decision. Of course it does. In fact, most local governments already have an extraordinary amount of knowledge about the places they govern.
But there is a distinction between using knowledge about the living system to inform a decision, and allowing the living system to establish the starting conditions from which the decision is made.
Applying a Biocratic lens thus creates a different entry point from which all that information is interpreted and asks: what happens when the place itself becomes the starting condition? And how does the understanding of place actually shape the decision?
That’s where the shift begins. Not from human interests to nature’s interests, but from treating them as separate to understanding them as nested. This changes what becomes visible, what becomes possible and, ultimately, what decisions can be made.
Four parts, one continuous thread
Biocratic Governance is put forward here as a prototype to build, rather than as a system to adopt wholesale. What matters most, carried through every part of it, is the same structural flip: land re-storied and heard first, its guiding logic established before the human brief is drafted, held in place by a foundational Covenant, and kept alive by a caretaker. In doing so we change the question our data are being asked to answer. And the relationship they’re asked to hold.
1 — Re-story-ing the landscape
"Land speaks first” first of all asks us to restore and re-story our relationship with place. In many places that connection has been badly frayed or lost outright.
The result of this process of re-story-ing is the emergence of a living ledger - not merely a dataset, but a dynamic, evolving account that brings together many heterogeneous forms and fragments of existing and emerging knowledge held about and within a place; from technical to historical data, stories, and citizen observations.
The point here is not to sort these diverse data points into what counts as “real” knowledge and what doesn’t. It is to allow different forms of knowing to meet, accumulate and weave together into a richer understanding of place. And for that story to become part of how the place is governed.
2 — Deriving and validating the guiding logic
For land to actually speak first, its patterns need to be legible in a form governance can work with: not just a story, but the guiding logic - or more specifically, the place-based living logic - of the patterns, principles, rhythms, and relationships this story reveals.
Where do human and ecological patterns align? Where do they disrupt one another? Where are there opportunities for systemic alignment? Where do thresholds, seasonal cycles or other conditions need to be respected?
This guiding logic is then validated and stress-tested through diverse knowledge and situated experience, rather than treated as a fixed interpretation of place, asking what becomes visible and knowable when we overlay these different dimensions.
3 — Making it foundational through a living Covenant
The guiding logic needs somewhere to land: an instrument through which it can actually enter governance.
This is where we propose a living or biocratic Covenant, that makes the relationship between a governing body and the living system of its place explicit, rather than having it constantly being negotiated afterward as one interest among many.
The Covenant would take the form of a locally appropriate foundational instrument: an explicit commitment by a local governing body to make the guiding logic of the living system the starting point and baseline within which material decisions affecting the urban and rural environment are developed.
This is not about choosing between human activity and the living system. It is about changing the conditions under which decisions about human activity are formulated.
4 — Holding the relationship through a caretaker
A foundational relationship needs to remain alive as day-to-day governance unfolds.
The caretaker role would integrate this commitment into an existing local government position, holding the process through which the living system speaks into governance.
We envision the caretaker to be tasked with three main responsibilities: keeping the living ledger alive, ensuring the guiding logic remains responsive to changing conditions, and holding the Covenant as an active reference point as planners, policymakers, developers and others make decisions about and eventually with place.
Importantly, this caretaker is not “the voice of nature.” No single person can speak for an entire living system. Neither does it replace democratic deliberation with an appointed representative. Rather, they help change the conditions under which that deliberation happens.
This starts where we are
Biocratic Governance should not be confined to new developments, future spatial plans, protected natural areas, or ecological restoration projects. Most of the urban landscape we will inhabit in the coming decades already exists today.
We can flip the lens at any point in a place’s life, letting the land’s logic enter decisions about how what’s already present keeps operating, gets maintained, and gets adapted: an existing neighbourhood re-read through its water flows, soil conditions, and urban heat island patterns; a drought response that begins with the resilience of the living system rather than merely the protection of human infrastructure; a project already breaking ground still enhanced by applying a different structural filter.
From proposition to Minimum Viable Prototype
The four parts put forward form a continuous thread from living epistemology to governance:
Living ledger → guiding logic → Covenant → caretaker.
None of this however arrives fully formed, and it shouldn’t try to. What we put forward is deliberately a strawman. The next step would be to turn this into a Minimum Viable Biocratic Governance Prototype V1.0 to take into real governance contexts, creating multiple imperfect inroads into different real-world conditions and settings.
That means discovering what happens when the MVP encounters existing policies, regulations, planning rules, subsidies, economic incentives, and institutional boundaries. In fact, friction is close to guaranteed. But these points of friction may be one of the most valuable things to be revealed, showing us exactly where the existing governance system itself makes taking a different starting point structurally difficult, or even impossible.
An invitation, not a blueprint
The invitation is straightforward: bringing together a small group from the fields of e.g. bioregionalism, integrated landscape management, nature governance, Rights of Nature, and of course local governance, willing to co-create a Minimum Viable Prototype V1.0 - to put the starting point into practice, assemble a small cohort of willing local jurisdictions to expose this MVP to real world conditions, jointly learn from the friction, and see what becomes possible when, for once, land speaks first.
[Read the full Reframe here.]
Closing
Reframes are occasional pieces from the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox. They sit alongside our Learning Session syntheses and Field Dialogues as part of a growing body of field insights — reading the landscape, surfacing what deserves closer attention, and contributing to the kind of cross-field thinking that moves the work forward.
The sandbox is a space for generative inquiry and experimentation. These pieces are one expression of that — an attempt to see the field a little more clearly, together.
The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.
If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.
To receive syntheses of Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues in your inbox, subscribe below or sign up for our LinkedIn Newsletter instead.
We donate our time and energy to this sandbox. If you value this space, consider co-funding this work by leaving us a tip.
I really enjoyed this and would love to see what an MVP might look like that takes the place of anthropocentric mechanisms of governance.