River Dôn Living Stewardship Agreement is a civil society led innovation that builds capacity for more than human stewardship by enabling individuals and organisations to map relationships of interdependence and cultivate ongoing mutual commitments of care.
Problems and Purpose
Rivers in South Yorkshire are documented as being in poor ecological and chemical condition. Environment Agency classification data referenced in River Dôn Project materials indicate that, within the Don and Rother catchment, only a small proportion of surface waters meet "good" ecological status, and none meet "good" chemical status. These conditions persist despite existing regulatory and technical management frameworks.
In response, the River Dôn Project was established to explore complementary civic and infrastructural approaches to river stewardship. Rather than focusing solely on regulatory compliance, the project seeks to surface the social, ecological, and economic interdependencies that shape river health across the catchment. Within this context, the Living Stewardship Agreement was developed as a prototype tool to map relationships between human and more than human actors within the catchment, identify ecological conditions for thriving, and link those conditions to articulated commitments of care. Project materials describe the LSA as an exploratory "eco-social contract" intended to support relational accountability and learning rather than legal enforcement. Its purpose is not to replace statutory governance mechanisms, but to experiment with civic infrastructures that can document, coordinate, and make visible distributed stewardship commitments.
Background History and Context
The Living Stewardship Agreement emerged within the River Dôn Project, a place based initiative operating in Sheffield and the wider South Yorkshire region. The project brings together civil society organisations, researchers, cultural practitioners, technologists, and environmental organisations to develop a portfolio of interoperating components intended to support stewardship across the catchment. These components include environmental sensing infrastructure, digital engagement platforms, citizen science initiatives, legal experimentation, and cultural programming.
Within this broader portfolio, the Living Stewardship Agreement was developed as a core prototype focused on collective sense making and commitment making. Strategy materials describe the project as building "critical capabilities for stewardship," including collective sense making, commitment articulation, environmental sensing, regulatory interfaces, and participatory financing. The LSA is positioned primarily within the collective sense making and commitment making functions of this ecosystem. While initially developed in the River Dôn context, elements of the LSA have been tested and discussed in related river governance settings as part of its iterative development.
Organizing, Supporting, and Funding Entities
The Living Stewardship Agreement is implemented as part of the River Dôn Project through collaboration between multiple organisations in South Yorkshire, including Opus Independents, Dark Matter Labs, Sheffield Hallam University, the Urban Flows Observatory (University of Sheffield), Don Catchment Rivers Trust, Lawyers for Nature, South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre, and Hive IT. These organisations contribute through research, facilitation, technical expertise, cultural programming, and project coordination.
Funding has included project based grants, philanthropic sources, and in-kind contributions from partner organisations. Detailed funding allocations are not publicly specified. The Living Stewardship Agreement does not operate as a statutory body and does not hold a formal public mandate from government authorities.
Participant Recruitment and Selection
Participation in the Living Stewardship Agreement is open and non-formalised. The initiative does not operate through fixed membership, electoral selection, or appointed representation. Individuals and organisations become involved through workshops, public events, research collaborations, and cultural activities organised as part of the River Dôn Project. Participants have included local residents, community groups, artists, architects, researchers, environmental practitioners, and representatives of civil society organisations connected to the River Dôn catchment. Engagement occurs through invitations circulated by partner organisations, public communications, and event specific outreach. Participation varies by activity and is distributed over time rather than concentrated in a single assembly or forum.
While human participation is open and informal, the structure of the LSA tool itself incorporates more than human actors into the agreement framework. The LSA is designed to "expand our understanding of citizens to include humans and more-than-humans," treating non-human beings such as rivers, habitats, and species as ecosystem actors within the mapping and commitment making process. Their conditions, dependencies, and needs are documented and made structurally central within the agreement framework. The LSA does not currently establish formal proxy representation, guardianship roles, or delegated authority for specific non-human entities; more than human inclusion occurs through the design of the mapping and commitment architecture itself.
Methods and Tools Used
The Living Stewardship Agreement functions as a relational mapping and commitment making tool embedded within the broader River Dôn Project infrastructure. It is designed as "a tool to help citizens create and practice a living eco-social contract, connecting an ecosystem actor's needs to another's acts of care."
The central method is participatory mapping of relationships within the catchment. Through facilitated workshops and public activities, participants collaboratively identify ecosystem actors including rivers, habitats, and species; human actors including individuals, organisations, and institutions; and relationships of interdependence between them. This mapping makes visible how ecological conditions, social practices, and institutional arrangements intersect within the river system. Following relational mapping, participants identify conditions for ecosystem actors to thrive and articulate corresponding commitments of care. Commitments are recorded as part of a living agreement, meaning they are intended to be iterative and revisable over time rather than fixed or legally binding. The tool links ecological needs directly to human actions, creating traceable relationships between ecosystem conditions and stewardship practices.
The LSA is being prototyped through workshops, river walks, participatory art practices, and public events, with arts and culture explicitly integrated into its implementation. It operates alongside environmental sensing infrastructure and citizen science initiatives within the River Dôn Project, with plans to integrate real time environmental indicators, geolocated citizen observations, and qualitative contributions including stories, photographs, and artistic responses. A digital engagement platform intended to host environmental data, citizen science contributions, and recorded stewardship commitments remains in prototype form. The tool does not currently function as a formal decision making mechanism and commitments are not legally enforceable.
What Went On: Process, Interaction, and Participation
The Living Stewardship Agreement has been prototyped through facilitated workshops, river walks, cultural programming, research collaborations, and digital prototyping sessions within the River Dôn Project in South Yorkshire and in related exploratory contexts. These activities functioned as iterative pilots rather than as a standing deliberative forum.
Participation was voluntary and event based with no fixed membership lists, voting procedures, or binding decision rules. Workshops generally followed a structured progression: facilitators introduced the river catchment as an interconnected ecological and socio-economic system, encouraging participants to move beyond administrative boundaries and consider the catchment as a network of interacting actors. Participants then worked in small groups to identify ecosystem actors such as river stretches, tributaries, habitats, and species; identify human actors including residents, institutions, and organisations; map relationships between them; articulate conditions necessary for selected actors to thrive; and identify corresponding human commitments linked to those conditions. Mapping exercises were collaborative and visual, with groups constructing diagrammatic representations of interdependence shared in plenary discussions. The emphasis was on surfacing relationships and documenting commitments rather than resolving disagreements or adopting binding decisions.
One documented event took place along the River Lea in collaboration with Cody Dock, during which participants explored what it means to build a stewardship agreement for an ecosystem in practice. Participants examined how human and non-human actors connected to the River Lea are entangled in reciprocal relationships, and facilitators invited them to identify conditions necessary for ecosystem actors to thrive and reflect on how these are shaped by human practices. An early version of the LSA tool developed by Dark Matter Labs was used to surface ecosystem relationships and begin documenting commitments of care. The event functioned as a testing ground for the agreement's methods and language.
In parallel with workshop activities, the River Dôn Project incorporated arts and cultural programming including river walks, poetry events, public discussions, and data visualisation installations in which environmental data were translated into visual or immersive formats displayed in public settings. The LSA was used within these contexts as a structured framework for reflection and commitment making. Participation included civil society organisations, researchers, technologists, artists, and environmental practitioners, with exploratory engagement from institutional actors. Sessions were treated as iterative learning environments, with feedback informing adjustments to facilitation language, sequencing of exercises, and interface design.
Influence, Outcomes, and Effects
The Living Stewardship Agreement remains an ongoing initiative. Its outcomes are primarily observable in terms of prototype development, documented stewardship commitments, cross sector collaboration, and contribution to emerging civic infrastructure.
Workshop implementation has informed iterative modifications to the structure and sequencing of mapping exercises, the articulation of conditions to thrive for ecosystem actors, and the format used to record commitments of care. Facilitated sessions have produced visual and diagrammatic relational maps alongside recorded voluntary commitments linked to identified ecological conditions. The relational logic of linking ecosystem conditions to documented commitments has also influenced the architecture of the broader River Dôn digital and environmental data infrastructure, including conceptual development of a geolocated engagement platform and integration planning between environmental sensing data and community commitments.
The Living Stewardship Agreement has facilitated collaboration among civil society organisations, researchers, technologists, artists, and environmental practitioners, with LSA sessions functioning as structured spaces for exchange across sectors. Interview material indicates that the LSA has informed discussions concerning accountability mechanisms and alternative governance arrangements, including exploration of peer to peer validation of stewardship commitments, participatory finance mechanisms, and linking ecological evidence to governance processes. These mechanisms remain under development.
Interview material suggests that participation in LSA workshops prompted reflection among participants regarding ecological complexity and interdependence, with contributors reporting that participants often recognised limitations in their prior understanding of river systems following relational mapping exercises. No formal evaluation report has been published and no quantified behavioural or ecological impact data have been released.
Analysis and Lessons Learned
The Living Stewardship Agreement illustrates a form of democratic innovation that operates through civic and relational infrastructure rather than formal authority or binding decision making. Rather than seeking immediate institutional reform, the initiative experiments with how stewardship relationships can be rendered visible, documented, and coordinated through participatory tools and socio-technical systems.
A defining feature of the LSA is that inclusion of more than human actors is embedded within the architecture of the tool itself. Ecosystem actors are not incorporated through legal personhood or formally appointed guardians; instead, the agreement structures participation such that ecological entities are positioned within relational maps, their conditions for thriving are articulated, and human commitments are recorded in relation to those conditions. Representation is enacted through infrastructural design and documentation practices rather than through office holding or formal mandate. This suggests an alternative modality of more than human representation — one that shifts attention from who speaks for non-humans to how governance infrastructures position them within decision contexts.
The eco-social contract framing signals a shift from rights claims toward reciprocal commitments. Rights of nature approaches typically rely on formal legal recognition and enforcement mechanisms; the LSA instead experiments with governance organised around documented commitments, peer visibility, and evolving relational accountability. This does not displace rights based models but explores whether stewardship practices can be cultivated prior to or alongside institutional reform. The move also redistributes the site of political agency: responsibility does not reside exclusively in formal representatives or courts but in distributed civic actors who document and revise their relational obligations.
The agreement is explicitly conceived as living: commitments, relationships, and identified ecological conditions are revisable over time rather than representing a fixed settlement. This temporal orientation contrasts with democratic models centred on discrete decision moments such as votes or time limited assemblies. River systems also traverse administrative jurisdictions and resist enclosure within a single territorial authority; the LSA responds to this spatial unboundedness by focusing on relational coordination rather than territorial control. Together, these features — spatial openness across jurisdictions, temporal openness across ecological cycles, and institutional openness across phases of experimentation — reflect a governance logic designed for dynamic rather than settled conditions. A structural question this raises is how to maintain the durability and visibility of commitments over time without formal institutional anchoring, and how to connect decentralised relational experiments to statutory systems in ways that preserve rather than constrain their adaptive qualities. These are conditions shaped by the broader funding and institutional landscape within which place based civic initiatives operate rather than limitations of the initiative's design.
See Also
- Zoöp (Zoöperation) – A governance framework embedding more-than-human representation within organisational decision-making.
- Confluence of European Water Bodies – A recurring transnational gathering focused on water governance and representation of non-human entities.
- River Dôn Project – The broader civic infrastructure initiative within which the Living Stewardship Agreement was developed.
References
[1] River Dôn Project. River Dôn Project Website. Available at: https://riverdonproject.org
[2] Dark Matter Labs. Towards an Eco-Social Contract: The Living Stewardship Agreement. Available at: https://darkmatterlabs.org
[3] River Dôn Project. River Dôn Project Strategy Deck. Internal project document.
[4] Fang-Jui Chang. Interview transcript, 2025.
[5] Alban Krashi. Interview transcript, 2025.
[6] Environment Agency (UK). River Basin Management Plan Data for Don and Rother Catchment. Available at: https://environment.data.gov.uk
[7] “A Vision Paper for Decentralized Civic Infrastructure.” Unpublished manuscript shared by project contributors.
[8] River Dôn Project. Theory of Change Document. Internal project documentation.
[9] Cody Dock. Cody Dock and River Lea Stewardship Activities. Available at: https://codydock.org.uk
[10] Dark Matter Labs. Living Stewardship Agreement Prototype Materials. Project documentation and workshop materials.
[11] Now Then Sheffield. “Verbs Not Nouns: How Language Can Shape Alternate Worldviews.” Available at: https://nowthenmagazine.com
[12] River Dôn Project. Festival of Debate Participation Materials. Available via project archives.
External Links
- River Dôn Project Website: https://riverdonproject.org
- Dark Matter Labs: https://darkmatterlabs.org
- Cody Dock (River Lea partner organisation): https://codydock.org.uk
- UK Environment Agency River Basin Data: https://environment.data.gov.uk
- Festival of Debate (Sheffield): https://festivalofdebate.com
Additional contextual information:
- South Yorkshire regional information: https://www.sheffield.gov.uk
- UK Rights of Nature campaign information: https://www.rightsofnature.org
Notes
- The Living Stewardship Agreement is described by project contributors as an evolving prototype rather than a finalised governance instrument.
- † Interview references are based on transcripts provided by project collaborators in 2025.
- ‡ Internal strategy and theory documents were shared directly by River Dôn Project contributors and were not published at the time of writing.
Public image attached is by Opus independent.
Contributor Positionality Statement
This case entry was prepared by Claudia Fernandez de Cordoba (2026), founder of Living Imaginaries. Living Imaginaries is a social enterprise focused on reimagining how societies govern, relate, and live with more-than-humans. Working at the intersection of climate, biodiversity, food, health, and justice, it combines creative re-imagination with practical pathways for structural change. She is also a doctoral researcher at University College London, where her research examines more-than-human democratic innovation and biodiversity governance.
The contributor was not involved in designing or facilitating the Living Stewardship Agreement methodology. However, she attended a Living Stewardship Agreement workshop and related project events as an observer-participant and conducted interviews with project contributors during the preparation of this entry. Her participation took place as one participant among others and did not involve facilitation, agenda-setting, or authority over outputs.
The case draws on publicly available project materials, including River Dôn Project documentation and Dark Matter Labs publications, as well as interview transcripts and internal strategy materials shared by contributors. Where interview content is referenced, it is treated as a primary source reflecting the organisers’ own account of the initiative and its development.
Descriptive sections are grounded in documented materials and publicly reported information. Reflections informed by participant observation are used to support contextual understanding but are not presented as evaluative claims. Interpretive analysis is confined to the Analysis section and informed by the contributor’s broader academic research on emerging practices of nonhuman representation, relational governance, and democratic innovation.
This entry was developed as part of the project Developing a typology of emerging practices of nonhuman representation and participation, laying the groundwork for more-than-human democratic innovations, conducted in collaboration with the Centre for Deliberative Democracy, the Knowledge Network on Climate Assemblies (KNOCA), the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, Participedia, and the University of Westminster.
