In This Together

Governance as a multispecies endeavour

I feel like I in am in the goo of a chrysalis these past few months, and in this place, I find myself withdrawing from work focuses - hence such a quiet Ecological Us.

This hasn’t been a full-fallow creative time and what energy I have for writing has been funneled into two commissioned pieces. The first of these, In This Together: Governance as a Multispecies Endeavour, is a succinct (and hopefully not reduced) exploration of why members of organisations might find it challenging to consider multispecies governance, along with some ways we might run small, iterative experiments moving us towards a more multispecies governance.

While this article explores organisational governance, I think that the pull to a more multispecies governance is felt in many other places and forms: from how we steward our neighbourhoods, councils or municipals, local, regional, and global politics, and more.

Below you’ll find an extract of the article and the link to read more.

Visual depicting collaboration and connection in a more than human world, created and shared by the editors of the Transformational Governance Community’s commissioned articles.

‘Governance is such a generous endeavour. Originally meaning ‘to steer’, I hold governance as committed listening, attentive discernment, and response-able engineering. A committed listening to what is and what might be, an attentive discernment of what is appropriate, and a response-able engineering — with engineering here meaning an imagining, shaping, repairing, and rearranging — of the systems and structures that enable aligned action.

How we listen and discern is just as important as the aligned action that governance enables. What we include is accompanied by what we exclude. What we give prominence to is twinned with what is diminished. The voices that we hear also hold the unheard.

After years deep-diving into organisational governance, the field of governance that I specialised in, I was left bewildered and frustrated that none of the thoughtful governance approaches I met, practised, and trained in required us to examine the personal and collective worldviews and cosmologies that inform what is now and our ideas, needs, and hopes about what might be. Neither did they require governance to be a multispecies endeavour.’

Read the full article here.