What is an Interspecies Council?

The ‘Interspecies Council’ is a methodology developed in 2021 to integrate more-than-human perspectives into decision-making and policy-making.
It is part of a growing field known as ‘more-than-human governance,’ which has emerged in response to human-centric decision-making approaches that contribute to ecosystem degradation and environmental pollution. This approach seeks to address these issues by broadening the scope of governance to include the perspectives of non-human entities and the natural world.

The ‘Interspecies Council’ was developed by Phoebe Tickell and the team at Moral Imaginations, alongside hundreds of people who participated in workshops from 2021-2023. In essence, the Interspecies Council is an adaptation of ‘The Council of All Beings’ for decision-making settings, using an approach similar to a citizens assembly. It is a participatory, democratic, semi-improvisational practice guided by facts and real-world issues, brought alive by roleplay, improvisation, theatre, arts, imagination and sensing.

The aim of the Interspecies Council is to bring the voice of nature and non-human beings into organisational decision-making, governance mechanisms and policy development. 

This methodology is part of the lineage of ‘The Work That Reconnects’ of the American Buddhist scholar and environmental activist Joanna Macy, in particular her exercise ‘The Council of All Beings’ and it was developed with her support, guidance and blessing. It takes roots both in the deep ecology movement and in ways of knowing and being in relationship that have been stewarded by indigenous traditions since time immemorial. 

Rather than a discussion about nature, it becomes a discussion from the point of view of nature. The Interspecies Council supports and encourages a profound shift in worldview and perspective, and asks us to decenter our human selves and interests for the purpose of empathy, connection and care with the living world around us. It is a practice and methodology that both catalyses a shift in worldview in those who participate, and also works as a practice that, repeated over time, strengthens the muscle of more-than-human empathy and connection.

The Value of Integrating More-Than-Human Voices into Governance 

More-than-human thinking asks us to engage with the needs of both humans and other species in decision-making, recognising that our actions have an impact beyond people-centred considerations. Participants discuss the problems facing the ecosystem/place from the point of view of the ecosystem/place itself and its wildlife, bringing non-human beings into political decision-making. 

As a tufted duck, we are excluded from the river… Humans are partitioning off different areas. We could never tell them ‘you’re not allowed in some part of your city’.

— Tufted Duck, from the River Roding Interspecies Council

As developing policies require thinking far into the future, mitigating risks and planning with uncertainty, imagination can help us experiment, test what works and identify what can be explored further. 

For people taking part in it, the Interspecies Council acts as a leveling tool, bringing people with different roles and experiences together and allowing them to find common goals. It can highlight areas of tension which then prompts reflection about potential solutions and compromises. It also sparks new conversations and provokes thinking by bringing different possibilities to life.

In the words of the founder and director of Moral Imaginations, Phoebe Tickell:

“The shift we are making is from seeing nature as separate from human beings, to seeing that non-humans and humans are all a part of nature. It takes a leap of imagination, but many of the participants reflected that once they made the jump, it became quite easy, and they discovered a whole different perspective. By using radical imagination, we can start to bring a voice of non-human species into our meetings, boards, and design processes.”

Building a field of case studies, collaborators and practitioners

Over the last 4 years, we have worked with community groups, activists, grassroots organisers, organisations, government representatives and policy makers to share and build the methodology and practice, learning about what works and what doesn’t along the way. Our aim with this practice and methodology is to equip anybody who wants to lead an Interspecies Council with the tools and the training and support to do so. If you would like to be supported to do this, please get in touch. We are planning on organising our first training with a cohort of up to 15 people in 2025.

A Case Study: The River Roding Interspecies Council

In April 2023, Moral Imaginations worked with Policy Lab UK and DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) Futures to host an Interspecies Council with civil servants, local councillors, non-profit workers, activists and residents of the River Roding. It was part of the Water Post 2043 project aimed at “exploring what decision-making in relation to the freshwater system could look like post 2043, if transformed”.

24 participants were brought together, including stakeholders with a professional or community interest in the local area, to consider the more-than-human perspectives. This translates as imagining and empathising with the needs of some of the species living in and around the river Roding. Each participant was given a different animal, or part of the natural world to represent in discussions.

Some of the key themes discussed were human chauvinism, interspecies solidarity, human control of the environment, destruction of the river banks, segregation and division of species, colonisation of the land with human settlements, and a lack of understanding of the non-human lens.

The three biggest problems identified by the Council dealt with:

• Human mindset and values: the need for humans to understand the river in systemic terms, to spend less time monitoring the river and giving more space for nature to heal and flourish.

• Making the river whole: the fragmentation of the River Roding, both through physical barriers that impede the flow of the river and through human attempts, creates an artificial segregation between habitats and species.

• Protecting all species: all species of the Roding should be cared for, not just those that are especially charismatic, or officially ‘protected’ or ‘native’.

Whilst tracking the impact of this work, we saw an appetite for people to keep engaging, both with each other and the river Roding, weeks after the Council had taken place. A legacy effect of more-than-human empathy developed: almost all participants reported a noticeable, lasting change within their perception or feelings towards nature, the world or themselves in the week after the Council. For example for Phil Tovey, head of DEFRA Futures:

“I must admit I probably as much as anyone else went into this with a bit of skepticism, about [whether we could] just come out with the same insights if we weren’t thinking from the species perspective. But what I actually found was, when we started getting into interspecies dialogue with one another it really brought new insight into the whole way we think about how decisions should be formed with those different ecological relationships.”  

Hosting an Interspecies Council can give a profound glimpse into how political decision-making might look when we decenter human interests and give equal weight to other beings with whom we share our waterways, soils and skies. It is an essential methodology to create pathways and strategies to place life back at the center of our governance systems, and help catalyse futures that are rooted in values, an expanded sense of connection to nature.