Modern democratic systems were designed around specific imaginaries of the political world: individuals represented as citizens, interests aggregated through elections and deliberation, and governance embedded within economic systems organised around industrial growth. These frameworks helped expand participation and rights over time, while gradually recognising broader obligations, protections, and relationships that extend beyond immediate electoral interests. Yet the underlying structures of democratic governance remained largely organised around human-centred, territorially bounded, and growth-oriented assumptions, rather than the deeply interconnected social, cultural, and ecological systems that shape life on Earth.Today, democratic systems face growing pressures that reveal the limits of these inherited frameworks. Across many societies, declining trust in institutions, voter suppression and unequal political participation, communities feeling unheard, ecological systems under strain, and decisions affecting future generations being made without their meaningful consideration all point toward widening tensions within existing democratic models.

More-than-human thinking opens a deeper question about democracy itself. If democratic life emerges through complex relationships between humans, more-than-human beings, ecosystems, and future generations, how might democratic institutions and our understanding of political communities evolve to recognise and govern through these relationships? Bringing together democratic innovation and more-than-human governance helps explore this possibility. Around the world, emerging alternatives such as multi-species assemblies, rights of nature initiatives, longstanding Indigenous governance traditions (including, for example, the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council), and ecological guardianship councils suggest that democracy may need to move beyond simply expanding participation toward transforming how relationships between humans and the living world are recognised, and supported within governance systems.

Drawing on a dialogue convened by Claudia Fernandez de Cordoba in collaboration with Living Imaginaries and the Centre for Deliberative Democracy, this piece brings together perspectives from scholars and practitioners across these domains to argue that reimagining democracy requires moving beyond representation toward more relational forms of governance. A key challenge to dominant democratic models of representation comes from Indigenous relational perspectives, as articulated by Andraya Stapp. Andraya (Ngāti Porou, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui) is a Māori-Dutch researcher who navigates the complexities of growing up ‘off country’ and the fragmentation of ancestral knowledge caused by family migration. Her research establishes ethical pedagogies at the ‘Cultural Interface’ (Nakata 2007), a reconciling aggregate narrative of Māori, Aboriginal, and Western Feminist Multispecies knowledges. Grounded in whakapapa (layers of connection, lineage) and guided by her whanau (family), including more-than-human kin, she operates from a reciprocal obligation to care for the mana (dignity/integrity) and wairua (spirit) of the entities of the more-than-human world.

Drawing on whakapapa, and the Australian Aboriginal concept of Kinship-mind (Yunkaporta 2019), Andraya positioned herself as deeply embedded in relationships of responsibility with peoples, places, knowledges, objects and the more-than-human. She problematised Western representations that presume distance, hierarchy, and linear time, and attended to the tension and balance of her own intra-actions in webs of connection. This responsibility is enacted through place-based storying. Place -based storying in this definition refers to forming a profound relational understanding with place over time. It means listening deeply and with humility to the stories that place (and all the entities of place) share. It also implies a reciprocal obligation of care that must be ongoing for the relationship to continue. This requires respecting the stories of place and not using them for extractive purposes or self-interest. It also engenders responsibility for the ongoingness of place. While storying shifts according to context, and can function as a governance structure (e.g., when First Nations peoples formally meet to extrapolate a solution to a problem due to their systems knowledge and respect for place as kin), Andraya utilises it as a system for generating, transmitting, adapting, and storing knowledge collectively with human and more-than-human beings. In this methodology,........

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