How to Do More-Than-Human Politics: Towards an Ecocentric Model of Democratic Representation

Abstract: Drawing on the Øens Have workshop, a performative experiment in multispecies sense-making, this article argues that environmental political theory remains limited by a sociocentric conception of representation that excludes nonhumans as agents of political articulation. Rather than merely extending human representation to other species, the article proposes a transfiguration of representation itself, recognizing that representative claims already emerge across species lines. From this perspective, the Øens Have experiment shows how representation might become a multispecies practice of mutual attunement—an ecocentric reorientation that not only widens the field of representation but transforms its ground, inviting us to imagine politics otherwise.