Executive Summary
There is a growing network of people and places exploring and practising how governance and policy design
can draw on more-than-human intelligences.
‘More-than-human’ was initially coined by David Abram in his 1997 book The Spell of the Sensuous. The term refers to the animate earth and the impossibility of separating our human- ness from our relationship with it. Our exploration related to governance has been around how we might meaningfully consider our relationship with the living world when taking decisions.
We have undertaken a short exploratory research project to learn who is conducting new governance experiments in Europe to begin to map the field, learn from best practices, and share these findings. We convened a day-long learning exchange in the Netherlands on 18 June 2024 with many of the people involved in the projects that we discovered. This paper synthesises the findings and outcomes.