More-than-human engagements and multispecies justice – topics of the future
Written by Venla Sunikka Research Assistant at Luke
News 23.6.2025
In early May 2025, the JustGLOBE (justglobeproject.com) project hosted a conference entitled “Multispecies engagements and the more-than-human lens in environmental politics and governance (justglobeproject.com)” at the University of Helsinki City Centre Campus. The pre-conference focused on the projects results where project staff and collaborators presented their work, on variety of topics, ranging from environmental (in)justice, extractivism, (de)coloniality, care work and labour, transformations, and a panel discussion on creating space for multispecies and more-than-human science-policy interface. You can listen to the recorded presentations here.
The conference day began with first keynote address that nicely set the stage for the day’s parallel sessions, where cases such as human-bear encounters in Bulgaria, whale bioacoustics and their interpretation by humans, the Global Ocean treaty, lawn replacement incentives in Utah, and biodynamic winegrowing in New Zealand were discussed. Such a wide array of different cases demonstrated the diversity of context where multispecies justice and more-than-human perspective are relevant. Finally, the day closed with keynotes on central concepts such as multispecies encounters and transformation. All keynotes were recorded and are available at the Conference Wrap-up page.
Reflections from the conference
The conference proved to be an exciting and inspiring two-day-long venture into the complexities of the more-than-human, multispecies, questions of (in)justice and (de)coloniality, extractivisms and bioeconomy, and ethical considerations that such topics necessarily bring about. Having studied social anthropology, which some refer to as “philosophy within a context,” I very much appreciated that the conference offered both critical conceptual openings stemming from firmly contextualised empirical material, as well as encouraged embedded institutional rethinking, combined with the practical work to remind us that these are not mere intellectual curiosities, but structures, ontologies and epistemologies that shape real existences of both humans and others. For example, as framed by Eric Mensah Kumeh in his presentation about environmental injustice and green extravism in Ghana, are there alternative models of land-intensive bioeconomy genuinely supporting regenerative livelihoods? These questions are very practical: what are regenerative livelihoods in a specific context, how can they be encouraged or maintained, under which conditions?
What I further appreciated, was the blurring of the (often persistent) Global South/Global North boundary in the conference program and discussions. In addition to there being a lot to gain from engaging beyond the Global North, the conference made it clear that these questions are not geographically bound.
The highlight of the conference for me was the excellent keynote session on multispecies justice by Danielle Celermajer and David Scholsberg. I found the presentation to be both empirically firmly grounded, yet conceptually courageous and liberating, offering potentially transformative reasoning and pathways. Defining multispecies justice as the possibility to function and flourish, they underlined the importance of relationality: attending to relationships rather than separate entities. Justice, in this formulation, doesn’t mean that everything is the same in every relation, but relationships are always contextual and with a particular set of others.
The quest for multispecies justice begs the question of how do we or any other community take anything without undermining the webs of (socio-ecological) relations that make the world. Such tricky ethical considerations come up as soon as one begins to critically examine the philosophical distinction between humans and non-humans, or between nature and culture – the Cartesian dualism. I believe (following Donna Haraway famous idea of staying with the trouble, a book published in 2016), there is a need to stay with these discomforts. It’s a process of constant, necessarily contextual and historical negotiation. Further, it requires us to recognise ourselves as part of the vulnerabilities that make up lifeworlds. It’s a rethinking that may potentially be experienced as destabilising. To that end, the conference offered a lot of food for thought and felt like peak of invigorating inspiration after a long spring. It was especially inspiring and motivating to see Luke centrally engaged in such discussions which might still seem marginal, but what I believe are unavoidable, key questions of the future.
You can also read this story directly on the Natural Resource Institute Finland (Luke) web pages.