This reflection emerged from many conversations. Some held across time zones, others in quiet moments with land and systems that speak more slowly than we do. It follows in the wake of deeply important work by others, including the Living Stewardship Agreement recently shared by Dark Matter Labs. That project makes a powerful call: to transition from ownership to stewardship, and from extractive governance to living systems of care.

I write this not to repeat that vision, but to build alongside it and ask:

What happens when governance stretches even further — beyond the category of ‘steward’ and beyond the centrality of humans altogether?

The river was granted legal personhood.

For years, activists fought to protect it from pollution, arguing that it had rights just like a corporation. When the ruling finally came, it was a victory. But then came the real challenge: how do you govern something that isn’t human?

Who speaks for the river?

How does it make decisions?

And what does governance mean when the governed are ecosystems, AI systems, informal economies and distributed digital networks?

Governance is still shaped by the industrial-era belief that human actors, particularly formal leaders, sit at the centre of power. But today’s world is governed as much by machine learning as by ministers, as much by markets and microbes as by ministries.

We live in a world where:

• AI allocates access to services faster than regulators can react

• Ecosystems demand representation in legal and policy systems

• Financial markets and social networks self-regulate without central authority

• Informal governance systems in the Global South shape everyday life for billions

If governance assumes human control, it will fail in a world that exceeds human limits.

The Living Stewardship Agreement shifts us toward collaborative ecological governance. But what if we go one step further?

What if governance wasn’t just about humans stewarding systems, but about recognising all systems — human and non-human — as co-governors?

Trade-offs, tensions and questions of power

To move beyond human-centred governance, we must first admit:

Human control was never neutral.

• Who decided what counted as intelligence?

• Whose systems of governance were privileged and whose erased?

• How did we come to believe that humans alone should decide what thrives and what fails?

In many places, governance is already decentralised and plural, not by design but by necessity. Communities self-organise outside the state. Ecosystems respond to stress through feedback loops. AI makes invisible choices that shape the public sphere. These forms of post-human governance already exist. We just haven’t recognised or designed for them.

Dark Matter Labs’ work helps reclaim governance as a living collective act. But the next step may require us to also release the idea of human stewardship as the primary framework and move toward relational governance, where the goal is not control or care but co-evolution.

What could exist instead?

If we stop assuming that humans sit at the centre, we can begin to imagine:

• From ownership to stewardship to relational governance
  Where land is not ‘managed’ but related to, negotiated with and listened to

• From oversight to entanglement
  Where governance is co-produced by AI, communities, sensors and stories

• From fixed structures to evolving constellations
  Where systems adapt to their context, informed by both data and cultural memory

• From imagined neutrality to epistemic plurality
  Where Indigenous, ancestral and informal governance systems shape the frameworks of the future, not just the margins

Designing governance this way isn’t only legal or technical. It’s deeply imaginative. And imagination is shaped by structure — by time, by trust, by access to language and infrastructure. If we want truly inclusive futures, we must also design imagination as a public good, not a luxury for the privileged few.

Questions to take with you

• Where does your governance system still assume human centrality?

• How might systems of governance relate with AI, ecosystems and distributed communities, not just speak for them?

• What practices of governance are already alive — in shadow, in kinship, in data flows — that we haven’t yet recognised?

• What does accountability look like when power is diffuse and interdependent?

This isn’t a complete map. It’s a thread in a longer weave.

It sits beside the work of those designing stewardship contracts, decolonial governance, mutual aid, cooperative AI and the thousands of quiet relational acts that hold communities together every day.

As always, I offer this as a question, not a solution.

What if governance wasn’t a structure but a relationship in motion?

This reflection emerged from many conversations. Some held across time zones, others in quiet moments with land and systems that speak more slowly than we do. It follows in the wake of deeply important work by others, including the Living Stewardship Agreement recently shared by Dark Matter Labs. That project makes a powerful call: to transition from ownership to stewardship, and from extractive governance to living systems of care.

I write this not to repeat that vision, but to build alongside it and ask:

What happens when governance stretches even further — beyond the category of ‘steward’ and beyond the centrality of humans altogether?

The river was granted legal personhood.

For years, activists fought to protect it from pollution, arguing that it had rights just like a corporation. When the ruling finally came, it was a victory. But then came the real challenge: how do you govern something that isn’t human?

Who speaks for the river?

How does it make decisions?

And what does governance mean when the governed are ecosystems, AI systems, informal economies and distributed digital networks?

Governance is still shaped by the industrial-era belief that human actors, particularly formal leaders, sit at the centre of power. But today’s world is governed as much by machine learning as by ministers, as much by markets and microbes as by ministries.

We live in a world where:

• AI allocates access to services faster than regulators can react

• Ecosystems demand representation in legal and policy systems

• Financial markets and social networks self-regulate without central authority

• Informal governance systems in the Global South shape everyday life for billions

If governance assumes human control, it will fail in a world that exceeds human limits.

The Living Stewardship Agreement shifts us toward collaborative ecological governance. But what if we go one step further?

What if governance wasn’t just about humans stewarding systems, but about recognising all systems — human and non-human — as co-governors?

Trade-offs, tensions and questions of power

To move beyond human-centred governance, we must first admit:

Human control was never neutral.

• Who decided what counted as intelligence?

• Whose systems of governance were privileged and whose erased?

• How did we come to believe that humans alone should decide what thrives and what fails?

In many places, governance is already decentralised and plural, not by design but by necessity. Communities self-organise outside the state. Ecosystems respond to stress through feedback loops. AI makes invisible choices that shape the public sphere. These forms of post-human governance already exist. We just haven’t recognised or designed for them.

Dark Matter Labs’ work helps reclaim governance as a living collective act. But the next step may require us to also release the idea of human stewardship as the primary framework and move toward relational governance, where the goal is not control or care but co-evolution.

What could exist instead?

If we stop assuming that humans sit at the centre, we can begin to imagine:

• From ownership to stewardship to relational governance
  Where land is not ‘managed’ but related to, negotiated with and listened to

• From oversight to entanglement
  Where governance is co-produced by AI, communities, sensors and stories

• From fixed structures to evolving constellations
  Where systems adapt to their context, informed by both data and cultural memory

• From imagined neutrality to epistemic plurality
  Where Indigenous, ancestral and informal governance systems shape the frameworks of the future, not just the margins

Designing governance this way isn’t only legal or technical. It’s deeply imaginative. And imagination is shaped by structure — by time, by trust, by access to language and infrastructure. If we want truly inclusive futures, we must also design imagination as a public good, not a luxury for the privileged few.

Questions to take with you

• Where does your governance system still assume human centrality?

• How might systems of governance relate with AI, ecosystems and distributed communities, not just speak for them?

• What practices of governance are already alive — in shadow, in kinship, in data flows — that we haven’t yet recognised?

• What does accountability look like when power is diffuse and interdependent?

This isn’t a complete map. It’s a thread in a longer weave.

It sits beside the work of those designing stewardship contracts, decolonial governance, mutual aid, cooperative AI and the thousands of quiet relational acts that hold communities together every day.

As always, I offer this as a question, not a solution.

What if governance wasn’t a structure but a relationship in motion?