In April 2025, Foodrise, Moral Imaginations and wyrd futures convened an Interspecies Council in which over 35 participants represented species and ecological systems to respond to Defra’s draft Land Use Framework for England.
Problems and Purpose
The Interspecies Council was convened in response to the UK government's 2025 public consultation on a proposed Land Use Framework for England. [1] The organisers identified that decisions about future land use would affect not only humans but also other species and ecological systems, while the consultation did not provide a formal mechanism for considering their interests or experiences. [2]
Foodrise, Moral Imaginations and wyrd futures organised the Council to develop a response to the consultation from more-than-human perspectives. Participants represented designated species and other beings in considering questions concerning the future of land use in England. Contributions generated through the Council informed a formal written response to Defra's consultation. The organisers also saw the initiative as an opportunity to test the Interspecies Council as a tool for policymaking. [2][3]
Background History and Context
In early 2025, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) opened a public consultation as part of the development of a Land Use Framework for England. The proposed framework concerned how land could be managed in relation to multiple objectives, including food production, biodiversity restoration, reaching net zero emissions, housing and infrastructure, and public health and wellbeing. [1]
The Interspecies Council took place during this consultation period. The organisers selected five areas from the wider consultation for participants to consider: the scale of land-use change; principles of land use; making space for nature; balancing demands associated with nature, food, people and infrastructure; and governance and decision-making, including questions about who should participate in decisions over land. [4]
The initiative applied the existing Interspecies Council method developed by Moral Imaginations to a national policy consultation. It followed earlier applications of more-than-human approaches to public policy in the UK. In 2023, Moral Imaginations worked with Defra Futures and the UK Government's Policy Lab to convene an Interspecies Council concerning the River Roding as part of the Water Post 2043 project. The project brought local communities and stakeholders together to consider the future of freshwater decision-making. Moral Imaginations had also worked with Camden Council from 2022 to incorporate collective imagination, more-than-human perspectives and long-term thinking into council leadership, policy and strategy. [2] The 2025 initiative was the first application of the Interspecies Council to shape a response to a national land strategy. [2][3]
What Went On: Deliberation, Decisions, and Public Interaction
Participation began approximately one week before the Council. Participants received a briefing pack introducing the Defra Land Use Framework consultation and the more-than-human being they had been assigned to represent. They were asked to research their being's history, evolutionary relationships, habitat, needs and relationships with other species and humans. The preparation encouraged participants to combine factual research with imagination, including thinking about the being's personality, interests and possible positions on policy questions. Participants were also invited to bring an object or piece of clothing that helped them connect with their being. [4]
I represented Yellow Rattle. My briefing introduced me to its origins and relationships, habitat in species-rich grasslands and hay meadows, ecological role in reducing grass dominance, and dependence on low-nutrient grasslands and traditional hay-meadow management. It also identified threats including agricultural intensification, fertiliser and herbicide use, and cutting before seed dispersal. [4] From this starting point, I researched Yellow Rattle further, considering its age and origins, ecological role, environmental threats, relationship with climate change and humans, and the wider ecological web of species with which it was connected. [9]
The Council took place at Paper Garden in London on 5 April 2025, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. [3][4] The day began with an introduction to the gathering and the policy context of Defra's Land Use Framework consultation. We discussed the scale of land use in England, the proposed shift towards multifunctional land use, biodiversity commitments, and questions about who benefits from and makes decisions about land. [4][9]
Participants then gathered in a circle. The facilitators used embodied and imaginative exercises to help us move into the perspectives of our designated beings. The Council involved embodiment, storytelling and circle dialogue. Each participant had opportunities to speak as their being, drawing on their preparation to reflect on its experiences, needs, relationships and perspective on land use. [3][9]
Although each participant embodied a particular being, the dialogue allowed participants to build on one another's contributions. For example, Dor Beetle explicitly built on an earlier contribution from Glow Worm. After each contribution, the circle responded collectively, "We hear you, being." Participants also brought relationships between beings into their contributions. In this way, the discussion did not only present individual perspectives but also made some of the ecological relationships between represented beings visible. [9]
Participants raised different experiences of land and land-use change. Mayfly, for example, spoke about pollution and its short lifespan; domesticated animals including Pig and Chicken discussed their position within farming systems; and Bramley Apple Tree and Wheat Field reflected on their relationships with humans. [2][9] At the end of this embodied part of the process, participants thanked the beings they had represented and returned to their human perspectives. [9]
After a shared lunch, participants moved into smaller discussions organised around themes from the Defra consultation. Rather than being assigned to a particular group, participants moved between themed stations according to the issues they felt most drawn to contribute to. They used sticky notes and large sheets of paper to record positions, questions and tensions. The discussions addressed issues including principles of land use, making space for nature, competing demands on land, timescales, and governance and decision-making. [3][9]
During these discussions, participants drew both on the perspectives of their designated beings and on their own knowledge and experience, and the distinction between the two sometimes blurred. [9] The discussions engaged more directly with the language and assumptions of the consultation. Participants questioned, for example, the terms "use," "land" and "ownership," contrasting these with coexistence, place and stewardship. Speaking as Yellow Rattle, I proposed that the framing would be different if it were a "Land Care Framework" rather than a "Land Use Framework." Participants also questioned the timescales used in land-use planning and who was included within categories such as "land managers." [2][9]
The group subsequently reconvened. The final part of the day included a creative exercise in which participants produced short responses on behalf of their beings, including drawings, marks and short poems. [3][9] The organisers then used contributions from the Council and smaller-group discussions to develop the formal response to Defra. Foodrise led the analysis and drafting, with input from the other collaborating organisations. The organisers state that the written response drew on words spoken during the Council, which they shaped to fit the policy context. [2][3]
Influence, Outcomes, and Effects
The initiative achieved its immediate intended outcome of producing a more-than-human response to Defra’s Land Use Framework consultation. The Council's response entered Defra's formal consultation on land use. This gave more-than-human perspectives a route into an established policy process, despite the consultation not having a formal category or mechanism for representing non-human beings. [2][3]
The response also appears to have generated some informal attention among policymakers. Foodrise subsequently reported that the submission had stood out and prompted conversations among civil servants. This suggests that the process may have introduced policymakers to perspectives and framings that differed from conventional consultation responses. However, there is no evidence that this reflection translated directly into policy change. [5]
Comparison with the final Land Use Framework suggests limited substantive uptake of the Council's more distinctive proposals. The Framework contains themes that also appeared in the Council response, including stewardship, longer-term decision-making, ecological connectivity and landscape-scale approaches. [2][7] However, these similarities cannot be attributed to the Council: Defra received thousands of consultation responses and did not identify which submissions informed particular changes. [6]
The final Framework did not adopt some of the Council’s more distinctive proposals. The Council had challenged the framing of land as something to be “used,” proposed greater emphasis on care and stewardship, and called for more-than-human beings to be included as stakeholders or decision-makers in land governance. [2] The final Framework retained “land use” and multifunctionality as central concepts. While it gives substantial attention to biodiversity, habitats and ecosystem restoration, decision-making remains centred on human institutions and actors rather than providing mechanisms for representing more-than-human beings. [7]
Thus, while the initiative achieved its immediate aim of bringing more-than-human perspectives into a formal national consultation, there is no indication that it led to the more substantial changes to land-use governance proposed in the response. [2][6][7]
Analysis and Lessons Learned
The case raises a question about what counts as an outcome for more-than-human democratic innovation. Judged by direct policy uptake, its effects were limited: the final Land Use Framework did not adopt the Council's more distinctive proposals. [2][7] Yet participant accounts describe shifts in how people approached the policy problem. The participant representing River, for example, described moving from familiar questions about human inclusion towards questions about who could speak for a river, what human ownership of land meant, and how future humans and non-humans might gain a voice in institutions. [8] Similar shifts appeared across the Council. Pig and Chicken questioned assumptions that domestication implied dependence on, or consent to, human control. Mayfly foregrounded a lifespan measured in hours, while Hawthorn, Oak and Soil brought much longer ecological timescales into discussions about land. [2] The process therefore did more than introduce additional interests into an existing policy debate: it enabled participants to question some of the human-centred assumptions about agency, ownership and time through which policy problems are normally understood.
The case also highlights a tension between institutional legibility and imaginative disruption. The Council questioned some of the basic categories through which Defra framed land governance, including land as something to be "used," ownership, multifunctionality, administrative boundaries and standardised policy timescales. [2] These were not simply recommendations that could be added to the Framework without questioning some of its underlying assumptions. The organisations could have made the response more compatible with existing institutional language, potentially increasing its chances of uptake or achieving more tangible changes to the strategy. But this was not the primary purpose of the exercise. The purpose was also to reimagine what land-use governance could look like, and doing so required some freedom from the constraints of existing political imaginaries. One participant captured this tension particularly well: “What did we do? What do we hope to achieve? We took the invitation seriously, we played hard. I do not imagine Defra will now publish a place-care framework, based on principles of reciprocity, love, and eco-democracy! But we have not gathered to consider limitations — we have gathered to let our imaginations run literally wild.” [8]
The process also exposed a tension between individual representation and relational practice. The Council assigned each participant a particular being, creating a relatively bounded structure of representation. [3][4] In practice, however, participants built on one another's contributions and spoke about relationships and dependencies among beings. Dor Beetle, for example, explicitly responded to Glow Worm, while other contributions connected beings through food, habitat, water and land-management relationships. [9] The deliberation therefore became more relational than the one-participant/one-being structure might suggest. This raises a practical question for future applications: whether more-than-human representation should continue to centre individual beings or experiment more explicitly with representing relationships, ecosystems or ecological assemblages.
See Also
Interspecies Council — Participedia method entry describing the method used in this case. Interspecies Council – Participedia
References
[1] Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra). Land Use Consultation. 31 January 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/land-use-in-england
[2] Foodrise, Moral Imaginations and wyrd futures. A More-Than-Human Response to Defra's Land Use Consultation for England: A Collective Submission from an Interspecies Council. June 2025. This is the principal source for the Council's contributions, species represented, organisational roles, and formal consultation response. https://foodrise.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/MTH-Consultation-Response.pdf
[3] Foodrise, Moral Imaginations and wyrd futures. A More-Than-Human Response to Land Use for England: A Case Study of Using the Interspecies Council as a Response to Defra's Land Use Framework Consultation for England. May 2025. This provides the organisers' retrospective account of the process, participant feedback, and project design. https://foodrise.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/MTH_casestudy_final.pdf
[4] Moral Imaginations. A More-Than-Human Response to DEFRA's Land Use Consultation: Participant Briefing Pack. 1 April 2025. Unpublished participant materials, not otherwise publicly available; used for the participant preparation, workshop purpose, and description of the consultation questions. Held in the contributor's personal records as a Council participant and, where permission allows, may be attached to this Participedia entry as supporting media.
[5] Foodrise. "More Than Human: Asking rivers, trees and birds how we should use the land." 4 August 2025. This retrospective account, written by Foodrise's executive director, describes the submission's dissemination and reports informal interest among civil servants. https://foodrise.org.uk/more-than-human-defra-land-use-response/
[6] Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. Land Use Consultation: Summary of Responses. 18 March 2026. Defra reports receiving 7,381 responses (comprising 6,095 organised campaign responses and 1,286 unique responses) and states that consultation feedback informed preparation of the final Framework. https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/land-use-in-england
[7] Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs. The Land Use Framework for England. 18 March 2026, updated 6 May 2026. Used to compare the final Framework with proposals contained in the Interspecies Council response. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/land-use-framework/the-land-use-framework-for-england-accessible
[8] Rickard, Thomas. "Becoming River: An Interspecies Council for England's Land." Moral Imaginations (Substack), 30 October 2025. Used for the participant's reflection on representing River, governance, and the role of imagination. https://moralimaginations.substack.com/p/becoming-river-an-interspecies-council
[9] Fernandez De Cordoba Farini, Claudia. Participant notes and reflections from the Interspecies Council as Yellow Rattle. 5 April 2025, unpublished notes. Used for first-person observations and reflections where indicated in the entry.
External Links
A More-Than-Human Response to Defra's Land Use Consultation for England – the formal submission document, Foodrise, Moral Imaginations and wyrd futures
https://foodrise.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/MTH-Consultation-Response.pdf
Interspecies Council: Defra's Land Use Consultation – case account published by Moral Imaginations
https://www.moralimaginations.com/watchet-imagines-1
Defra Land Use Consultation and consultation outcome – gov.uk consultation page, including the published summary of responses
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/land-use-in-england
The Land Use Framework for England – the final published Framework, 18 March 2026
Foodrise – official organisation site
Moral Imaginations – official organisation site
https://www.moralimaginations.com/
wyrd futures – official organisation site
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) – official organisation site
Acknowledgements
The entry is part of the more-than-human democratic innovations collection. It was developed through the research project Mapping emerging practices of nonhuman representation and participation led by Lucy J. Parry and Hans Asenbaum at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy, Claudia de Cordoba Fernandez Farini of Living Imaginaries and Graham Smith at the University of Westminster. The project is funded by Participedia and the Centre for Animals and Social Justice.
Contributor Positionality Statement
I participated directly in the Interspecies Council, representing Yellow Rattle, and therefore write from both a participant and researcher perspective. My participation shaped my attention to more-than-human representation, ecological relationships, different temporalities, and the role of imagination in reframing policy questions.
I research democratic innovation and more-than-human approaches to democracy and governance at University College London and through my social enterprise, Living Imaginaries. These interests may make me particularly receptive to the value of this type of experimentation. I have therefore sought to distinguish my own observations and interpretations from organisers’ accounts, participant reflections, and documented outcomes.
