Image caption: A ‘bee stop’ in the Dutch city of Utrecht. After years of pollinator decline, the city stabilised its urban bee population through solutions such as bee hotels and the creation of local pollinator pathways, installing green roofs on over 300 bus shelters in the city centre. Image: FastCompany
Reframes are occasional pieces from the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox. They sit alongside our Learning Session syntheses and Field Dialogues as part of a growing body of field insights — reading the landscape, surfacing what deserves closer attention, and contributing to the kind of cross-field thinking that moves the work forward.
The sandbox is a space for generative inquiry and experimentation. These pieces are one expression of that — an attempt to see the field a little more clearly, together.
Find the original article on the Substack of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox.
Short on time? Read the synopsis of this Reframe here.
This Reframe sets out a proposition for a Biocratic Governance mechanism that would act as a generative and foundational layer - aligning the decision and design logic of local governance with “land speaks first”, versus land and nature as a constraint applied afterwards.
We lay out a strawman, a 4-step practical approach, to turn the concept into an adaptable prototype for testing in real world conditions.
In this Reframe:
01 — From considering nature to governing from within the living system
02 — Re-story-ing the landscape
03 — From re-story-ing to a guiding logic
04 — The living Covenant
05 — The caretaker
06 — The continuous thread
07 — This starts where we are
08 — From proposition to Minimum Viable Prototype
09 — An invitation, not a blueprint
The absent instrument
We have reached the point where we can see the limitations of asking nature and the more-than-human to inform governance without changing the epistemological and procedural basis from which governance operates. Many have come to similar conclusions, although what is currently still absent in most jurisdictions is an instrument that makes the living system the starting condition of local decision-making.
In this second Reframe we propose such an instrument as a means to provide inspiration, invite discussion, and jointly explore pathways that turn theory into practice: enter a four-part Biocratic Governance proposition. At the same time, we want to clearly acknowledge that this is not a new idea: particularly in indigenous and traditional societies, the governance mechanism we describe here has successfully governed the relationship with land for thousand of years.
Land speaks first
Land speaks first. That shift sounds deceptively simple, but we are all hosted by the land we live on and the wider (biocultural) landscapes this land forms part of. “Land speaks first” in practice changes what a local authority asks, how knowledge is assembled, how relationships and balancing between them are understood, and ultimately what kinds of decisions become possible.
The question is therefore not simply whether a municipality, council, waterboard or other territorial authority considers the land alongside other factors when making a decision. Of course it does. The question is: What happens when the place itself becomes the starting point? That is where the shift begins.
Nested, not opposed
Let us be clear though that this is not a choice between the living system and human activity. It is a way of organising human activity in relationship with the living system it depends upon. The shift as such is not from human interests to nature’s interests. It is from treating them as separate or even opposing to understanding them as nested.
This Reframe sets out the proposition, details how we envision the 4-step practical approach, and closes with an invitation for jointly turning the strawman into a Minimum Viable Prototype.
1. From considering nature to governing from within the living system
The issue is not a lack of knowledge
Most local governments already have an extraordinary amount of knowledge about the places they govern. In multiple ways, these data are already being used every single day to make informed decisions about the present and future of a place. But there is a distinction between using knowledge about the living system to inform a decision, and allowing the living system to establish the starting conditions from which the decision is made.
The issue is seldom that local governments lack information about the land they govern. It is the starting point from which that information is interpreted.
A river landscape in drought
Take a perhaps familiar example: a river landscape in a period of drought - a reality in many parts of Europe in summer 2026. A local authority may already have extensive hydrological data, biodiversity data, groundwater models, water-quality measurements, climate projections, and spatial analysis. It may know exactly where water is being lost, where soil is compacted, where retention capacity is low, where nature is stressed, where essential human needs are at risk, and where interventions could help. None of that knowledge is in question.
Asking a different first question
From within the prevailing governance paradigm, this approach is entirely reasonable, and it can produce real, beneficial, ‘triple bottom line’ outcomes - for people, planet, and the local economy alike. But a Biocratic lens asks a different first question: how did the understanding of place actually shape the decision?
Was the river landscape’s own living system - and our nested relationship with it - the starting point from which the decision grew? What was it telling us about the conditions it needs to remain alive and functioning? And how did that understanding shape how we continue to live, work and develop in relationship with it?
That distinction matters, because we can become extremely sophisticated at considering nature without ever actually letting the living system change the starting point from which we imagine and make decisions.
What actually changes
That’s the shift Biocratic Governance is proposing - starting with the living system and working outward. The data, models and engineering expertise remain essential. What changes is the question they are being asked to answer. And the relationship they’re asked to hold. This changes what becomes visible, what becomes possible and, ultimately, what decisions can be made.
Importantly, a biocratic approach does not begin from the assumption that human and economic activity must “give way to nature.” It asks what conditions allow housing, farming, business and other human needs to be met within a functioning living system, and how human activity can align and flow with the patterns and capacities of that system.
The shift is not from human interests to nature’s interests. It is from treating them as separate to understanding them as nested - something, perhaps ironically, many farmers understand intuitively, yet often have little room to act on within prevailing food production and supply systems.
2. Re-story-ing the landscape
Land speaks first is not simply an invitation to listen more carefully. It’s a governance proposition. Before asking what we want to build, protect, regulate or finance, the process starts by asking a different question: what is this place, and how do we restore and re-story our relationship with it? In many places that connection has been badly frayed or lost outright, so re-storying isn’t only about capturing what’s there today - in places where it’s gone, it’s about actively recovering and restoring it, not merely continuing something that’s still intact.
Why start with story
Why start here, rather than jumping straight to a governance instrument? Because re-story-ing does more than gather information - it’s how connection to a place gets rebuilt in the first place. Many people, communities, local conservation and Rights of Nature efforts around the world are, at heart, driven by a very human need: to have their concern for a polluted river, a vanishing wetland, a disappearing species, actually seen and heard, and folded into how decisions about that place get made.
Re-story-ing gives that concern a structural home, rather than leaving it to be expressed through protest, campaigns or litigation; and it does so at the level of landscapes and place, fostering a deeper sense of belonging to the land we inhabit.
Re-story-ing also sharpens our ability not just to appreciate a landscape, but to actually read it - to understand its patterns well enough to govern in relationship with it, rather than simply around it.
What the ledger is woven from
That re-storied ledger is heterogeneous by nature. And most places already have many fragments of this story. There is the hydrological data. The soil maps. Ecological monitoring. Historical records. Folklore traditions. Climate models. GIS layers. Local planning knowledge. The observations of farmers, ecologists, water managers, and people maintaining public space. Citizen observations. Local nature groups. Stories about a river, a wetland, a forest edge or a neighbourhood tree canopy. Knowledge accumulated by people who have lived in a place for decades.
While some of these data currently stand limited chance of being incorporated into a local jurisdiction’s ecological governance infrastructure, small shifts can yield a richer data base. Municipal ground crews and maintenance staff for instance are already out in the landscape every working day. Easy digital prompts allow them to log what they notice, thereby adding another strand to the weave. Low-barrier prompts for the wider public - a marker along a canal path inviting a passer-by to note what they see- could add another.
Not a competition between knowledge types
The point isn’t to sort these diverse data points into what counts as “real” knowledge and what doesn’t. Neither would ‘grassroots data’ function as a vote or veto. Rather it lets these different forms of knowing, alongside deeply technical data, meet, accumulate, weave and inform one another, building a richer, continually maturing account of place - held with the land and from both perspectives, not only of it from ours.
A living ledger, not a dataset
That’s different from simply adding more inputs to an existing decision process, because what’s being built here isn’t merely a dataset. It’s a living ledger: a dynamic, evolving account that keeps being woven as the story of a place, and our relationship with it, keeps unfolding. And for that story to become part of how the place is governed.
3. From re-story-ing to a guiding logic
From accumulated knowledge to patterns and relationships
A living, re-storied account of a place is essential, but it isn’t yet an instrument of governance on its own. For land to actually speak first in a decision, its patterns need to be legible in a form governance can work with: not just a story, but the guiding logic, or more specific the place-based living logic - the patterns, principles, rhythms, and relationships - that the story reveals. Re-storying rebuilds relationship and connection; the guiding logic is what turns that relationship into something governance can actually act on.
What patterns, principles, rhythms, and relationships emerge when we look at this place from the perspective of the living system rather than through a primarily human lens?
This is where the living ledger begins to generate a distilled expression of how the living system of ‘place’ functions and what forms of relationship and systemic alignment allow it to remain viable and regenerative.
How (re)generative AI can help us flip the lens
Much of the relevant logic is often already latent in existing local plans, strategies, and regulations, be it urban planning regulations or a water management strategy. However most of us have been trained to translate this logic through an anthropocentric lens. This is where (re)generative AI pattern-recognition tools could become particularly useful, as they are exceptionally good at recognising patterns across large and heterogeneous bodies of information.
Given the sheer volume and variety of quantitative and qualitative data feeding into a living ledger, letting AI take a first pass at surfacing relationships and drawing out the underlying patterns and principles can quickly generate an initial version of the place-based guiding logic, while having it less bound to default human framing.
Overlaying the different dimensions
But pattern recognition is not the same as understanding. This makes it critical that such an emerging guiding logic gets validated and stress-tested through diverse human (and where possible, more-than-human) knowledge and situated experience.
For example, a first iteration might reveal relationships between the urban fabric and watershed dynamics, atmospheric and wind pathways, soil systems, pollinator movement, heat patterns, vegetation and seasonal cycles. Overlaying these systems in spatial and other ways can begin to reveal where human patterns align with the living systems around them - and where they disrupt, fragment or constrain them.
Questions this makes possible
From this, questions become possible which are often more difficult to ask from today’s starting point:
- Where should we seek active systemic alignment with watershed, soil, atmospheric, pollinator and other living systems?
- Which relationships need to be supported for human and ecological patterns to remain viable together?
- What does a healthy, balanced relationship between human and ecological patterns actually look like here? E.g. both human and more-than-human interventions can be genuinely destructive for the other party, although fighting them at the level of symptoms won’t create a workable balance.
- Where may humans need to step back, seasonally or temporarily, so we can support the recovery and resilience of land, water, or other species?
- Where does the living system have different rhythms, thresholds or cycles from those imposed by our administrative and economic systems?
- Where can apparently competing needs be redesigned as both/and relationships rather than treated as an inevitable either/or ecology-versus-economy trade-off?
A responsive range, not a hard cap
This is where the ontological shift becomes tangible, with the place-based guiding logic acting as the bridge between re-story-ing and governance. And it’s probably worth pointing out here that a logic drawn from a living system works less like a static number or a hard cap and more like a responsive range - loosening in a wet winter, tightening as drought deepens - because that’s closer to how the living system itself actually behaves.
4. The living Covenant
Making the guiding logic foundational
Although the place-based guiding logic forms the bedrock of a Biocratic Governance mechanism, it needs somewhere to land: an instrument through which it can actually enter governance and act as a foundational layer, thereby sitting before human governance layers.
This is where we propose a living or biocratic Covenant, that makes the relationship with and between us and the land that hosts us, our place, explicit, rather than having it constantly being negotiated afterward as one interest among many.
The Covenant would take the form of a locally appropriate foundational instrument: an explicit commitment by a local governing body to make the guiding logic of the living system the starting point and baseline within which material decisions affecting the urban and rural environment are developed.
This is not about placing land above human life in some hierarchy of control. It’s the recognition that eco-nomy is nested inside eco-logy, not weighed against it: it’s both/and, not either/or.
The land’s logic becomes the first filter through which a decision is formulated, followed by the human requirements, knowledge and possibilities that can work within that relationship.
From insight to the conditions of decision-making
Nonetheless, a local authority could reasonably ask: we already have so many plans, strategies, and data - wouldn’t this just be one more parallel layer? It’s not meant to be, because the existing knowledge and plans already contain real intelligence about the land. What the Covenant changes is the question that precedes all of that: how do we make that intelligence speak before the human brief is drafted, rather than after. And what does that mean for how we approach the decision in front of us.
The aim is not to choose between humans and nature. It is to change the conditions under which the choice itself is formulated. The Covenant therewith sets out the ‘terms & conditions’ of our relationship with the land. And this is also precisely where existing governance will begin to reveal its limitations, becoming visible as a product of a different starting point. A Biocratic Governance mechanism thus also gives us a way to more clearly see - and eventually repattern - these points of friction.
5. The caretaker
Keeping the mechanism alive
A Covenant this foundational cannot simply sit on a shelf. It needs someone who keeps the relationship it establishes alive in day-to-day governance, and that’s the role of the caretaker: an existing council member or equivalent local official with real standing, who takes this on as part of their role, rather than a new department or an added layer of bureaucracy.
Moreover, a developer preparing a project, a planner revising a neighbourhood plan, a policymaker responding to drought, or a council considering a new infrastructure proposal needs an entry point to engage with the Covenant, and the living ledger and guiding logic that underpin it.
Three responsibilities
The caretaker helps make this relationship operational. They hold the process through which the living system speaks into governance, maintaining its integrity, holding the terms of the Covenant as an active reference point, and making sure the relationship survives contact with the day-to-day workings of local government.
The caretaker therewith holds three concrete responsibilities:
- First, they oversee the living ledger, making sure it keeps functioning as a dynamic, evolving account, and that new data and testimony continue getting woven into the ongoing story rather than left to go stale.
- Second, they keep the Covenant’s place-based guiding logic responsive to what is happening in the living system, identifying where changing conditions may require the terms of our relationship with the land to shift or be reconsidered.
- And third, they hold those ‘terms & conditions’ as the reference point for developers, policymakers and planners: they can support with identifying where a proposal aligns with the living system, where it creates tensions, what relationships need further attention, as well as where existing policies, regulations, incentives, or procedures currently make alignment challenging.
Not the voice of nature
It’s also worth being precise about what the caretaker is not. They are not “the voice of nature” - no single person can speak for an entire living system, and the role shouldn’t be mistaken for that. They don’t replace democratic deliberation with one appointed representative for nature. They change the conditions under which that deliberation happens.
6. The continuous thread
From re-story-ing to governing
Biocratic Governance is being put forward in this Reframe as a prototype to build, rather than as a system to adopt wholesale. What matters most, carried through every part of it, is the same structural flip: land re-storied and heard first, its guiding logic established before the human brief is drafted, held in place by a Covenant, and kept alive by a caretaker - creating a different starting point for how a decision is made.
Taken together, these four parts of the Biocratic Governance proposition form a continuous thread:
Re-story the landscape.
Derive and validate its place-based guiding logic.
Make that logic foundational through a living or biocratic Covenant.
Hold the relationship alive and intact through a caretaker.
The thread that connects them
This is the thread from a living epistemology (a local accumulating body of knowledge about and with place) to having it enter governance:
- The Living Ledger weaves our plural knowledge of the land we live on and with.
- The Guiding Logic changes how that knowledge is interpreted into patterns, relationships, rhythms, and conditions for living together.
- The Biocratic Covenant changes the starting condition from which governance operates, letting land speak first.
- The Caretaker ensures that this new relationship remains alive as governance unfolds over time.
7. This starts where we are - with the urban footprint that’s already present
The existing landscape is the starting point
Biocratic Governance should not be confined to new developments, future spatial plans, protected natural areas, or ecological restoration projects. If we take Europe for example, most of its 2050 urban footprint already exists today. This means an instrument that only applies to how we design tomorrow’s neighbourhood, by definition, leaves most of its potential on the table.
Flipping the lens on what is already here
The question is just as much how we can begin to look differently at the streets, buildings, infrastructure, waterways, soils, trees, public spaces and neighbourhoods already around us. We can flip the lens at any point in a place’s life:
- An existing neighbourhood can be re-read through its water flows, soil conditions, mycelial network, urban heat island patterns, pollinator pathways, wind patterns, and human relationships.
- A redevelopment project can be approached through the living systems that are already there before its design parameters are fixed.
- A drought response can begin with the resilience of the living system rather than merely the protection of human infrastructure.
- And a project breaking ground next year can still be enhanced by flipping the structural filter, even if original assumptions were established years ago.
In practice, this requires letting the land’s logic into decisions about how what’s already present keeps operating, gets maintained, and gets adapted, not only into decisions about what gets designed and developed from scratch.
8. From proposition to Minimum Viable Prototype
What the prototype aims to understand
None of this proposition arrives fully formed, and it shouldn’t try to. The existing governance system is often deeply shaped by the very paradigm this proposition is trying to shift, which means friction is close to guaranteed wherever it’s tried.
This is why we propose developing a Minimum Viable Biocratic Governance Prototype - V1.0. Such a prototyping exercise would work through what this might actually require, e.g.:
- How do we re-story a landscape?
- How do we assemble and weave the living ledger, building where possible on what’s already there?
- How can artificial, human, and ecological intelligence help surface a place-based guiding logic from it?
- How do we validate and stress-test that logic?
- What could a biocratic Covenant actually contain?
- How does it enter the existing decision process?
- What does a caretaker actually do day-to-day?
- And what happens next when the Covenant encounters a regulation, subsidy, planning rule, institutional boundary or economic incentive that was designed from a fundamentally different starting point?
This would create a first strawman, that can be taken into a real governance context and tested. Running this in real-world conditions will surface friction with existing legislation, subsidy structures, institutional boundaries and procedures - and deliberately so.
Testing the mechanism in real world conditions
By subsequently taking the MVP (Minimum Viable Prototype) into various contexts, we start to generate multiple imperfect inroads into different real-world conditions. And we can begin to learn from what happens when the same underlying principle meets different landscapes, institutions and governance contexts.
Perhaps most importantly, trialing this in real, messy conditions is going to gradually reveal precisely where and when current, relevant law, policy, and incentive structures fail to accommodate land speaking first. And how challenging or straightforward it actually is to work around this and apply a different structural filter.
Learning from friction
Even better would be to assemble a small cohort of willing local jurisdictions, working through this together and comparing what each one runs into, fueling a process of collective learning. One place may discover a legal barrier. Another may uncover a data gap. The next one may find that an existing policy already contains part of the guiding logic, albeit translated through a different lens. Yet another may discover that the institutional boundary itself makes the living system almost impossible to govern as a whole.
One of the most valuable things a Biocratic Governance approach may reveal is where the existing governance system itself makes a different starting point for how we make decisions about and with the living system structurally difficult or even impossible
This can turn these individual friction points into a shared, growing case for that broader change - something no amount of pilots designed for compatibility with existing governance structures, or applied to ‘safe’ destinations such as an existing protected nature reserve, could produce on their own.
The aim is therefore not to create another conceptual framework, but an instrument that can enter the real world.
9. An invitation, not a blueprint
If you have made it this far into reading this Reframe, the invitation is straightforward: let’s bring together a small group of people from fields like bioregionalism, integrated landscape management, nature governance, Rights of Nature, as well as of course local governance, willing to co-create a Minimum Viable Prototype, based on the strawman we have set out here.
Not to perfect the idea, because this proposition is openly put forward here as a proposal to test rather than a finished answer; but to put the starting point into practice, expose it to real world conditions, learn from the friction, and see what becomes possible when, for once, land speaks first.
The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.
We also have a Substack, and a LinkedIn Newsletter. Both contain our written syntheses of insights from our prior, monthly Learning Sessions (since March 2025), as well as our more recent Field Dialogues (audio track and synthesis), and the occasional Reframe.
