Problems and Purpose

The Interspecies Council is a participatory methodology developed to address the limits of human-centred decision-making in environmental governance. Conventional policy and organisational processes tend to treat non-human beings as resources, externalities, or abstract indicators, rather than as participants in shared social and ecological systems. This contributes to governance arrangements that overlook interdependence, long-time horizons, and non-human forms of agency.

The method works through indirect representation: rather than discussing nature as an object of management, participants are invited to deliberate from the point of view of non-human beings and ecological systems themselves, speaking on their behalf through imaginative and ethical role-taking. The method aims to shift how problems, values, responsibilities, and futures are perceived, particularly in contexts where policy decisions have long-term ecological consequences. As articulated by its creator, the method supports a move from seeing nature as separate from humans to recognising humans as part of nature, requiring a deliberate act of imaginative and ethical decentring of human interests.

Origins and Development

The Interspecies Council was created in 2021 by Phoebe Tickell and is stewarded by the organisation Moral Imaginations. The methodology was prototyped and developed through workshops in 2021 and 2022 and first shared publicly in 2023. Since then, multiple Interspecies Councils have been convened in organisational, community, and government contexts across the United Kingdom.

The method draws inspiration from the Council of All Beings, an exercise developed within the Work That Reconnects, associated with Joanna Macy. With Macy's permission and support, elements of this lineage were adapted for use in decision-making and governance settings. While maintaining a connection to this lineage, the Interspecies Council is intentionally distinct: it is not a grief practice but an arts-based, semi-improvisational deliberative method designed for policy and organisational contexts.

The method is grounded in deep ecology traditions and ways of knowing that emphasise relationality between humans and the more-than-human world, including perspectives stewarded by Indigenous traditions. Moral Imaginations positions the Interspecies Council as part of a broader field of more-than-human or nature-centric governance.

Participant Recruitment and Selection

Participants in documented Interspecies Councils include a diverse range of human roles relevant to the issue under discussion. These have included civil servants, policymakers, local councillors, community members, non-profit workers, activists, designers, researchers, artists, and residents with professional or lived connections to a particular place. For example, the River Roding Interspecies Council brought together 24 participants with professional or community links to the river and its governance. A later Interspecies Council convened in response to the Defra Land Use Framework involved over 35 participants drawn from across England, with experience spanning conservation, governance, design, activism, and systems thinking.

Participants are assigned to or select more-than-human roles. These most commonly include individual species such as plants, animals, or insects, but may also encompass ecological entities such as a river or soil. Species and systems are typically selected in consultation with an ecologist to ensure ecological relevance to the issue being addressed. Preparatory materials are circulated in advance to introduce participants to the policy context, the method, and the beings they will represent. These materials are designed to be introductory and accessible rather than to provide in-depth ecological or species-specific training. Participants are therefore not selected based on prior ecological expertise.

How It Works

The Interspecies Council is a facilitated, in-person deliberative process that combines preparation, guided imaginative role-taking, and structured collective discussion. While each council is adapted to its specific policy, organisational, or community context, documented examples follow a broadly consistent sequence of stages.

Participants receive light preparatory materials in advance, typically around a week before the council. These include an overview of the policy or decision context under consideration alongside a briefing document for the more-than-human being or system they will represent. Species or system briefings are concise and accessible, outlining the being's life history, habitat, ecological relationships, needs, and pressures. For example, a briefing for Yellow Rattle describes its role in grassland ecosystems, its dependence on low-nutrient soils, and the effects of agricultural intensification on its survival. In some councils, participants are also invited to undertake an imagination walk, spending time outdoors while intentionally attending to how their assigned being might experience space, disturbance, rhythms, or boundaries or to bring a small object that helps them stay oriented to their assigned perspective during the council. Preparation is framed as orientation rather than training.

Councils are typically held as half-day, in-person sessions. The process begins with a facilitated welcome and explanation of the purpose, structure, and ethical framing of the method, followed by a grounding or attunement exercise such as short guided reflections, sensory prompts, or moments of quiet attention designed to help participants shift from their everyday human or professional identities into the perspective of the being they represent. Participants then introduce themselves in their more-than-human roles: in the River Roding Interspecies Council, for example, participants introduced themselves as river, soil, tufted duck, reed warbler, aquatic invertebrates, and riparian plants rather than by their human names or institutional affiliations.

The core of the process takes place in a facilitated council format, often organised as a circle. Participants speak in turn from the perspective of their assigned being, responding to prompts related to the issue under discussion. Contributions may address how proposed policies affect their habitat, what pressures or risks they face, or what conditions would be required for their flourishing. Facilitators support turn-taking and maintain the framing of speaking from perspective. Interaction is structured to prioritise listening and articulation rather than debate or persuasion, to surface multiple perspectives, dependencies, and tensions that are often absent from conventional policy discussions.

Following plenary dialogue, many councils move into smaller, facilitated group formats to explore specific questions in more depth. These may take the form of World Café style rotations or themed discussion tables. In the Interspecies Council responding to the Defra Land Use Framework, for example, participants rotated between tables focused on governance arrangements, spatial scales, land management practices, and decision-making principles. Discussions are time-bounded and structured, with participants continuing to speak from their more-than-human perspectives, and notes are taken to capture recurring themes, points of convergence, and areas of tension.

The council concludes with a collective synthesis in which facilitators or organisers reflect back key themes and invite final contributions. In some cases, participants contribute directly to visual or written documentation, such as annotated posters or collective notes. The closing phase often includes a brief transition out of role, acknowledging the intensity of the imaginative and emotional work involved.

The Interspecies Council does not involve formal decision-making procedures such as voting, ranking, or binding resolutions. It functions as a deliberative and exploratory method designed to generate qualitative insights and reframe how issues are understood. Outputs vary by context and may include collective statements, thematic syntheses, written reflections, artistic material, or contributions to formal policy consultations. These outputs may be translated into policy language by the organising team after the council, drawing on notes and documentation generated during the process. The method prioritises perspective shifting, relational reasoning, and ethical reflection; its influence lies in how the insights generated inform subsequent human decision-making processes.

Influence, Outcomes, and Effects

Across documented cases, including the River Roding Interspecies Council and councils convened in response to the Defra Land Use Framework, the method has influenced how participants frame biodiversity, land use, and governance questions. Reflections published by UK Policy Lab and associated partner organisations indicate that the Interspecies Council enabled participants to surface ecological interdependencies, long-term considerations, and ethical tensions not typically foregrounded in conventional policy consultations. Rather than treating biodiversity as a set of discrete assets or ecosystem services, participants articulated it as a relational condition shaped by reciprocity, care, and interdependence.

A consistent outcome reported across councils is the experiential impact of embodied perspective-taking. Participants described the process of inhabiting non-human roles as prompting ethical reflection, emotional attunement, and heightened awareness of ecological vulnerability and agency. For some, this resulted in a reassessment of professional assumptions and decision-making habits, particularly in relation to extractive or human-centred framings. Documented councils also describe a levelling dynamic in which participants from different professional roles engage on a more equal footing, with deliberation unfolding through relational reasoning and participants responding to one another's contributions across species perspectives.

In some contexts, the Interspecies Council has contributed to concrete outputs, including written consultation submissions such as responses to the Defra Land Use Framework, thematic syntheses of council discussions, and curated documentation combining written, visual, and narrative material. Public reporting, including coverage by ENDS Report, confirms that councils such as the River Roding Interspecies Council informed exploratory policy work within Defra Futures. The method has been applied in organisational, community, and government contexts across the United Kingdom.

Available evidence is drawn primarily from participant feedback, reflective documentation, and partner reporting. No publicly available independent evaluation or longitudinal study exists at the time of writing.

Analysis and Lessons Learned

The Interspecies Council operates through indirect representation: participants speak on behalf of named species or ecological systems rather than as themselves, using imaginative role-taking rather than formal delegated authority. This positions the method closer to sensitisation than to representation understood as delegated authority, facilitating ethical attunement and perspective shifting rather than the transmission of scientifically verified interests. This creates both possibility and vulnerability: it lowers barriers to participation and invites a wider range of people to engage with ecological interdependence, while leaving open questions about the epistemic grounding of the claims made. When participants speak as a species, the basis of those claims, whether rooted in ecological knowledge, situated experience, or imaginative projection, often remains unclear. Without clarity on this, there is a risk of epistemic overreach, where representations are understood as more authoritative than their basis can support. The method does not resolve this tension but accepts it as a condition of experimentation in more than human governance, and it points to a design question the field will need to develop further.

A notable feature of the method is how it reframes governance as a relational practice rather than as a managerial exercise. Participants frequently articulate concerns in terms of damaged habitats, disrupted cycles, and strained interdependencies. Ecological systems are not presented as passive backdrops to human action but as co-participants in shared conditions of flourishing and vulnerability. Deliberation unfolds through relational reasoning, with participants responding to one another's contributions across species perspectives and, in several documented councils, species voices explicitly building upon one another to model ecological interdependence within the structure of the dialogue itself.

The method also pluralises time within deliberation. Through role taking, participants encounter species and systems operating across radically different temporal horizons, some experiencing harm as immediate and existential, others embodying long cycles of regeneration and accumulation. This renders visible a structural mismatch between governance timeframes and ecological rhythms: electoral cycles, consultation periods, and funding horizons often compress or ignore ecological time. By situating participants within non-human lifeworlds, the council makes temporal asymmetry a deliberate part of the deliberative experience.

The method's primary effects are qualitative, relational, and experiential, they do not lend themselves easily to evaluation frameworks designed for policy instruments or representative bodies. These effects have nonetheless been documented across multiple instances and point to a consistent capacity to generate forms of ethical engagement rarely elicited through standard consultation formats. Moral Imaginations has developed a licensing model and facilitator training programme to build a growing community of practitioners around the method, supporting knowledge exchange and adaptation across contexts.

See Also

Council of All Beings – A precursor practice developed within The Work That Reconnects, from which the Interspecies Council adapts elements of collective role-play and more-than-human perspective-taking in a decision-making context.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://workthatreconnects.org/resources/council-of-all-beings/&ved=2ahUKEwj8odrB5LySAxVegFYBHTKDG6YQFnoECBkQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3NeFWOm70BvjuFD53arkBQ

References

Moral Imaginations. The Interspecies Council. Available at: https://www.moralimaginations.com

Policy Lab UK. Using experimental methods to reimagine decision-making for the freshwater system, post 2043. UK Government, February 2024. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications

ENDS Report. Government runs ‘first ever interspecies council’ to explore non-human policy perspectives. February 2024.

Tickell, P. (2023). Imagination activism with policy makers: The River Roding Interspecies Council. Moral Imaginations blog.

Macy, J. & Brown, M. Y. (1998). Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World. New Society Publishers.

External Links

1. Moral Imaginations – Interspecies Council
2. https://www.moralimaginations.com
3. UK Policy Lab
4. https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/policy-lab
5. DEFRA Futures and Land Use Framework Consultation
6. https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations
7. ENDS Report
8. https://www.endsreport.com
9. The Work That Reconnects (Joanna Macy)
10. https://workthatreconnects.org

Notes

1. The Interspecies Council is licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence and requires attribution using TASL (Title, Author, Source, Licence).
2. Delivery of the method is restricted to trained and licensed facilitators.
3. No publicly available independent or longitudinal evaluation of the method exists at the time of writing; claims in this entry are based on documented cases, organiser reporting, and participant reflections.
4. This entry reflects the state of the method during its early stages of development; practices and applications continue to evolve.

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 Interspecies Council methodology. She participated in an Interspecies Council convened in April 2025 by Foodrise, Moral Imaginations, and Wyrd Futures in response to DEFRA's draft Land Use Framework, speaking from the perspective of Yellow Rattle among over 35 participants at Paper Garden in London. 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 documentation, organiser reporting, and partner publications. Descriptive sections are grounded in documented materials and publicly reported accounts. Interpretive analysis is confined to the Analysis section and informed by the contributor's broader research on emerging practices of nonhuman representation and participation.

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.

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.