Professor Danielle Celermajer, Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute (SEI), together with SEI Director Professor David Schlosberg have been successful in securing $960,000 in funding from the V Kann Rasmussen Foundation to support a project addressing the need for wider consideration in decision-making processes beyond the human experience.
The project, Including the more-than-human in decision-making, aims to investigate non-human political inclusion and apply it in practical settings to provide frameworks for decision-making processes across different contexts.
'More-than-human'
“Broadly speaking, in the modern West, humans tend to think of ourselves as radically separate from everything, or I would say everyone else,” Professor Celermajer said.
“The dominant ideology is that we exist in nature, rather than as part of it.”
“What follows from this is that current decision-making frameworks only allow for human representation.”
The core of her work looks at how democratic and deliberative decision-making processes can be expanded to include the interests of the environment and non-human animals, or what has come to be called the 'more-than-human'.
“The value of such decision-making processes would be that more-than-human interests and wellbeing would be directly represented or included in decision-making, rather than being an afterthought at best.”
...there is a burgeoning of experimentation in how to better include the more-than-human in decision-making all over the world.
Professor Danielle Celermajer
From speculative theory, to global application
Currently, ideas around how to achieve more-than-human representation within Western decision-making remain mostly theoretical.
“This project takes the theory from a speculative stage into practical application and then testing it using the methodologies of the social sciences,” Professor Celermajer said.
This scientific approach includes deep analysis of existing practices and models of more-than-human representation. Texts examined will include media releases, websites, reports, adaptation plans, and outputs of similar climate or deliberative assemblies.
This analysis and evaluation will inform the production of generalisable and transferable guidelines on how decision-making bodies can implement more-than-human representation.
“Even more importantly, the project will conduct experiments in Australia and Europe, where we will work with communities and other institutions to design and implement decision-making practices that include the more-than-human. Our focus in these experiments will be in decisions concerning climate change, biodiversity, adaptation and disaster response policies,” she said.
“The ultimate objective of the project is to develop laws and policies that seriously consider the impacts our decisions have on the environment and other animals, and thus to better care for environments and biodiversity.”
“And of course, such policies would also have positive impacts on humans because we are dependent on these functioning environments and flourishing biodiversity.”
To fulfil the aspirations of this project, the team is partnering with international research and action institute, DemocracyNext, to harness their expertise in democratic innovations alongside their network of practitioners and stakeholder organisations from across the world.
“DemocracyNext is one of the most innovative organisations in the world, building democratic practices that are more inclusive, more just, and more effective.”
“As this project is about transforming democratic practice so that the more-than-human is better included, working with DemocracyNext will enable our work to be broadly disseminated.”
The project will also establish a global community of practice to connect researchers and practitioners, and create a knowledge base that future decision-makers can reference.
This hub of interdisciplinary collaboration will bring together policymakers, scientists, Indigenous knowledge holders, legal scholars, artists, and technologists.
“At the moment, there is a burgeoning of experimentation in how to better include the more-than-human in decision-making all over the world.”
“By creating a community of practice, we hope to connect people so they can share their ideas, their experiments, their methods and their findings.”
The timeline for this project is slated to run until December 2027.
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