Reimagining Biodiversity Governance: The North Sea as a Living Marine Democracy

By 2045, the governance of the North Sea has been fundamentally reimagined. 

Once treated as a transit zone and a commodity to be divided, the sea is now recognized as a living, relational system entangled with human and more-than-human communities. Governance has shifted from national sovereignty to bioregional cooperation, shaped by ecological continuities rather than borders or ownership claims. Technocratic control has given way to plural, biodiverse democracy: decision-making draws on situated knowledges, cultural memory, and multispecies relationships and representation. The sea is no longer an object of management, but a political subject with standing, agency, and voice. Governance follows ecological rhythms such as fish migrations and seabed restoration, guided by long-term responsibility shared across species and generations.

This isn’t utopia but a vision grounded in many plausible futures.

It draws on real-world examples and emerges from the collective labour of artists, ecologists, lawyers, scientists, urbanists, fishers, and policymakers who treated imagination as a political act. It traces shifts in law, culture, and institutions and the new forms of care, belonging, and responsibility they enabled, transforming not only governance, but life itself for humans, species, and ecosystems.

Bioregional Authority and Interspecies Representation

Political authority in the North Sea flows through the Interspecies North Sea Council, a transboundary governance body with legal standing, composed of representatives from more-than-human communities. Council seats are held by coastal municipalities, marine cooperatives, indigenous assemblies, and youth forums—as well as migratory fish schools, kelp forests, acoustic zones, and sediment communities. Representation is not symbolic, but material: fish representation is grounded in spawning data, migration patterns, fisher observations with AI used cautiously as a tool to detect multispecies rhythms, not as a substitute but alongside local, embodied knowledge. Authority resides with those with the closest, most sustained relationships to each entity. Decisions are no longer made in distant courtrooms alone, but within the ecologies they concern. The Council draws on legal precedents from across the globe. Inspired by the Whanganui River in Aotearoa—where rulings are made on the riverbank—governance here unfolds in place: in fishing harbors, wetland shelters, reef observatories linked to the North Sea. The sea is a co-constituent of political life, and governance happens with it.1

More-than-Human Law and Civic Stewardship

Across the North Sea region, experimental legal and civic models are common. In Amsterdam, eel guardians2 manage aquatic passageways using smart infrastructure aligned with migratory patterns. In Helgoland, seabird advisors3 contribute nesting data to marine planning.

Judicial processes have evolved significantly. While the global movement to recognize the rights and agency of more-than-human entities had been gaining ground for decades, a turning point for the North Sea came on 6 October 2022, when coral soundscapes—one silent, one teeming with life—were heard as a legal testimony in a moot court at The Hague.4 This moment widened the legal imagination, opening new questions about who holds standing in environmental governance.

In the North Sea, this shift redefined the grounds of legal participation. Today, courts routinely consider ecological memory and nonhuman testimony. As I write on Wednesday 3 May 2045, the Interspecies Council meets at the North Sea Pavilion in Scheveningen. Hydrophone archives echo alongside tide logs and oral histories. Councillors—eel stewards, seal guardians, coastal mayors—interpret live sonic data. Shrimp crackles suggest reef recovery. These soundscapes are not supporting data, but testimony. Ecosystems no longer speak only when humans are harmed—they speak with standing, and with continuous authority.

Over time, diverse approaches have emerged to engage more-than-human agency and representation—not by claiming to fully understand or speak for other species, but by creating space for their presence and signals to inform decisions. These practices recognize that we cannot fully know other ways of being, but by attempting to listen, we confront the epistemic boundaries of human governance and create space for new modes of attention, accountability, and relational knowledge to emerge.

Relational Geographies and Multispecies Time

The remapping of political authority is redrawing the geography of governance—from Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) to Relational Ecological Corridors (RECs),5 where jurisdiction follows the movement and rhythms of ecosystems. Governance aligns with zones shaped by herring spawning grounds, eel migrations, sediment drift, seasonal upwellings, and acoustic coherence.

Offshore wind infrastructure, once driven by efficiency and scale, is now shaped through ecological cohabitation. Predictive models6 integrate layered, site-specific data—including marine mammal presence, water conditions, and ecosystem dynamics—to guide turbine placement, maintenance, and operation in response to more-than-human life. Planning no longer follows generic risk templates but begins with the lived, sensory, and temporal patterns of local species and the specificities of each ecosystem. Energy governance is no longer imposed on marine environments, but emerges in dialogue with them.

Time has also shifted. Legal and planning frameworks no longer follow electoral calendars or fiscal quarters. Instead, they move with multispecies rhythms: cod spawning, kelp recovery, seabird nesting. Policy reviews include ecological memory—sonic, tactile, and migratory—documents carry interspecies consultation records7 and time scales: intertidal, generational, geological.

Ecological Literacy as a Civic Learning

These transformations rest on institutions that cultivate the capacity to hold them. The Dogger Bank School,8 a network of civic and ecological campuses, trains both youth and elders alike in interspecies law, restorative ecological practice, and participatory governance. Students work with hydrophone archives, and draft policy briefs with seaweed cooperatives. Governance here is an art of attention, practiced collectively, among barnacles and mayors alike. 

Post-Growth Economies and Interspecies Trusts

Financial systems in the North Sea bioregion no longer revolve around profit or GDP growth but interdependence and multispecies wellbeing.9 Funding is drawn from industries with ecological debts, multi-state allocations, and cooperative levies pooled into a shared treasury governed by the Interspecies Council. If the North Sea sustains us, sustaining it is a collective obligation.

The North Sea Treasury, housed in Rotterdam’s repurposed Europort, operates as a semi-autonomous public institution: embedded in transnational agreements yet empowered to act independently on socio-ecological terms. It manages post-growth instruments such as restoration bonds for former extraction zones—not tied to market returns but governed by ecological thresholds—and interspecies commonwealth trusts. A devolved budget model allows local marine councils and more-than-human representatives to allocate resources based on ecological indicators and situated needs. 

Last month, April 2045, reef monitoring networks flagged early coral bleaching off the Jutland coast. Within hours, the Treasury’s adaptive relief mechanism released emergency funding to the local marine council, triggering temporary fishing restrictions and support for affected livelihoods. The redistributive bank also funds long-term public roles, from coastal pollinator stewards to intertidal acousticians, now recognized as essential to regional wellbeing.

Old tools like biodiversity offsets, ecosystem service monetization, and natural capital accounting—built on the premise that nature’s value lies in its utility to humans—have been discarded. By reducing ecosystems to services that can be priced, traded, or replaced, they justified harm and commodified life. In their place are frameworks rooted in reciprocity and interdependence, supporting both ecosystems and communities. The economy no longer trades away harm. It cultivates care.

Cohabitation Replaces Ownership in Public Culture

These transformations are rooted in cultural change, but also in cultural remembering. Ocean literacy is now foundational—woven into art, education, media, and governance. Children grow up reading maps of kelp forests and migration corridors, not shipping lanes or national borders. In classrooms, textbooks speak of a longer arc—how, for a time, the sea was claimed and owned. Enclosed not just on maps, but through the erasure of lifeways, languages, and relations that once tethered communities to more-than-human worlds. As students read of the North Sea’s enclosure, many ask: “How could this way of being have ever been denied—and fall out of view for so many?”

As our relationship with the sea has deepened, so too has our language. Terms like “natural resources” now feel obsolete; in their place, words like “sea-kin,” “co-inhabitants,” and “commons” have become part of everyday vocabulary. 

Governance is also lived as a shared cultural practice, through schools, seasonal rituals, and daily maintenance. Each spring in Bergen, for example, children walk the shoreline with mollusc farmers and musicians to perform the Sea Greetings: a ritual of song and offerings that honours the seabed’s role in renewal. Rituals like the Sea Greetings in Bergen are often seen as new expressions of ecological awareness—but they echo practices long held by Indigenous communities, where seasonal rites affirmed not ownership, but belonging.

This shift isn’t only in what we value, but in how we value it. The sea is not “out there.” It is us and once people stopped seeing it as separate, they stopped deferring harm.

A Sea of Care: How Re-worlding Transformed Ecosystems, Health, and Livelihoods

Nowhere is the North Sea’s transformation more tangible than at the Dogger Bank. Once marred by seabed mining, oil extraction, and fragmented jurisdiction, it now flourishes as an interspecies commons—a living seascape shaped by mutual care across species. 

Gravel reefs host returning communities of soft corals and tube worms, while sediment-stabilizing vegetation supports nursery grounds for herring, cod, and rays.10 Seabird flyways trace the sky, their nesting supported by repurposed gas platforms now serving as roosting towers.11 Small cetaceans forage in quieter waters, aided by seasonal noise restrictions. Through careful protection and stewardship, the Dogger Bank has become a vital passage for seabed species, migratory fish, and seabirds—a keystone habitat in the North Sea’s ecological renewal.

This ecological resurgence is inseparable from its social parallel. Public health has improved: with cleaner waters, thriving ecosystems, and access to biodiverse blue spaces, rates of respiratory illness have dropped, while mental wellbeing has risen. 

These transformations have also strengthened social cohesion. Trust in public institutions has been rebuilt through participatory governance, while coastal communities, once divided by borders, now recognize shared fates. Migration is no longer weaponized.

Livelihoods have also been transformed. Youth are trained in restoration, marine monitoring, and interspecies stewardship. In Esbjerg, seaweed cooperatives operate as public trusts, distributing harvests among households, bioregional kitchens, and coastal regeneration projects. These efforts have enhanced nutrition, expanded food sovereignty, created dignified green jobs, and kept wealth circulating locally in communities.

The ripple effects reach every domain. Urban design, architecture, energy, food, and tourism are now grounded in ecological accountability. Bottom trawling is unthinkable. Instead, design integrates multispecies needs: hotels buffer shores with mussel reefs; construction uses biogenic materials; regional cuisines honour seasonal kelp and minimal bycatch in circular, respectful foodways. 

Ultimately, recognizing the sea’s agency did not diminish human justice, it deepened it. As anthropocentric law was unsettled, so too were the imperial hierarchies and logics of othering it upheld. This was not a departure from human rights, but a return to the relational grounds—shared vulnerability, interdependence, and the refusal to divide liberation along lines of geography, race, class, gender, ability, or species. By attuning governance to more-than-human worlds, societies uncovered more just and lasting ways to care for human life.

Laying the Groundwork: Imagination as Political Tool

The transformation of the North Sea began decades earlier, not through legal reform or top-down policy, but through civic assemblies, art spaces, and public rituals that seeded its reimagination.

The Embassy of the North Sea played a catalytic role. Emerging in the late 2010s, it acted as a prefigurative body, echoing the suffragette salons and republican clubs that historically incubated democratic change. Through initiatives like A Voice for the Eel, The Dogger Bank Manifesto, and The School of the Dogger Bank, it helped create the conditions in which new governance imaginaries could take root and evolve. It showed that rewilding ecosystems begins with rewilding our institutions. 

These efforts were never solitary. They were held within a wider confluence of actors: architects, legal scholars, social enterprises, scientists, farmers, educators, elder and youth movements. Networks like The Confluence of Water Bodies and the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature helped translate local practices into transboundary visions, offering mutual support as well as political scaffolding.

The path however was fiercely contested. Offshore drilling, industrial fishing, agribusiness, and shipping corporations pushed back. They invoked “economic stability” and “energy security” to defend extraction, weaponized disinformation, and pressured governments to criminalize dissent. Protesters were surveilled and attacked. In some places, violence followed.

Yet resistance held.

As the Post-Cold War order ruptured in the 2020s—with authoritarian resurgence, fractured multilateralism, and intensified competition over land, sea, and data—the façade of global progress collapsed. Rising inequality, democratic backsliding and environmental impacts exposed the failures of prevailing governance. Yet official responses leaned harder into market logic, techno-optimism, and securitized control. Borders hardened and militarization escalated. Surveillance expanded. Climate change was reframed as a threat to be contained, not a justice issue to be addressed.

Amid this breakdown, a kind of clarity took hold. The backlash against environmental and social justice exposed their shared antagonists—extractivism, colonial capitalism, patriarchal sovereignty—and the deep rooted systems of harm that connected them. In response, post-growth, abolitionist, Indigenous, feminist, food sovereignty, and climate justice movements began to organize to reimagine the very foundations of governance itself. 

That said, even within and between allied groups tensions surfaced over legitimacy, representation, and translation. What did it mean to speak with the sea, rather than for it? Who could be entrusted to represent more-than-human interests? These challenges did not break coalitions, they deepened them. What bound them was not a uniform strategy but an ethic: relational care across difference, rooted in the refusal to separate human and more-than-human liberation. 

Change did not emerge surface-level reform, technocratic fixes, or corporate partnerships. It required dismantling the economic and legal architectures that made harm profitable. Trade agreements were restructured around limits set by ecological relationships, not market demands; subsidies for destructive industries phased out; land and sea rights redistributed; monopolies broken up through commons-based governance.

The attention economy dominated by polarizing algorithms was disarmed. Social media companies, once complicit in fuelling disinformation, commodifying outrage, and fragmenting collective action, were held accountable for their role in ecological and democratic breakdown. New digital commons emerged for deliberation, storytelling, and collective organizing. Public imagination was reoriented toward civic, not commercial ends. This was not a greening of extraction, but a reorganization of power and value at its roots.

Crucially, the work did not just focus on crises, but on alternatives. Visions like Landback, Degrowth, Commons, energy democracy, and the Rights of Nature found resonance across regions. Experimental governance pilots emerged from the ground up, some as isolated efforts, others as part of growing coalitions. Coastal food cooperatives replaced export-oriented aquaculture and multispecies climate mitigation plans started to be developed.

Rights of Nature further evolved. While early efforts often invoked “legal personhood” as a strategic bridge into human-centered systems, the movement shifted to further question the very foundations of western legal systems. It challenged the premise that rights must be conferred by humans or that beings must mirror human traits to be recognized. Over time, new approaches emerged grounded in entangled relationships, reshaping how recognition and justice were enacted.

These initiatives collectively changed how the North Sea was seen, governed, and valued. They began to shift the broader political landscape, with political windows opening for democratic reform, environmental justice, and post-growth policy. What once felt naive or ridiculous became necessary and mainstream. What began in imagination catalyzed structural transformation.

Imagination was not escapism. It was a lever. It invited people to dream of different futures and created the hope, agency and desire to act towards them. By the time the North Sea became a political actor, the groundwork had already been laid. It had been dreamed into reality and fought into presence.