Elahe Rajabiani
The Multispecies Council: Nature's voice in governance
JRC - European Commission's Joint Research Centre
Bio
I am a designer at the EU Policy Lab, where I apply design and foresight to support creative policymaking and collaborative governance. My current focus is on the intersection of art-science-policy while designing future thinking activities, producing speculative artefacts, and facilitating participatory mapping and collective decision making sessions. I am leading a policy experiment on ‘Nature Consultation’ where I research and prototype ways to bring the more-than-human perspective within the EU Commission.
With a background in industrial and service design from Politecnico di Milano, I have previously worked as a service designer, design researcher and strategist in Milano and later as an open innovation program lead between The Design Factory of the University of Bologna and CERN IdeaSquare, coaching interdisciplinary teams of students at tackling societal challenges in collaboration with public and private sector.
I am also an independent filmmaker with a growing interest in ecology, animism and collective dreams.
Mentee must-haves/nice-to-haves
I’m looking for a mentee who brings strong motivation, curiosity, and commitment to exploring new forms of multispecies governance. Ideal candidates combine a visionary, creative approach with the ability to give form to ideas: whether through design, prototyping, storytelling, or technical experimentation. Some grounding in ecological thinking, AI, policy, or related fields is welcome, but above all I value passion, openness, and a willingness to go beyond text to make concepts tangible through making, sensing, visualising, or building.
Mentee role
Mentees will help develop a conceptual and technical framework for a Multispecies Council—or an equivalent nature-inclusive governance prototype aligned with the project vision. They will contribute to designing and testing a “proof-of-concept” workflow for animal or ecosystem consultation using AI, and craft a speculative yet research-informed narrative or simulation of how decisions might be made with nature. Depending on their background, mentees may create an ethical and governance guideline for non-human representation, produce a short film or sensory artefact exploring interspecies communication, or generate policy-ready insights and recommendations relevant to EU institutions. Overall, they will conceptualize, design, experiment, and narrate new modes of multispecies decision-making.
❓ Sample mentee tasks
- Prototype a “Nature Consultation” workflow -Literature review on non-humans in governance and policymaking - Create a prototype of a Multispecies Council - Explore communication channels between humans and a non-human species around governance questions
Mentor support
Direction, institutional knowledge, facilitating connection
Questions for applicants
What motivates you about working on a project on nature consultation, and what challenges or concerns do you imagine encountering along the way?
Mentor-led project
Nature consultation / Multispecies council
Core Inquiry: How might European institutions engage with ecosystems and species not merely as resources or service-providers, but as sentient, communicative partners in governance?
Project Vision: TWe like to explores how AI, ecological sensing, and ancestral/local ecological knowledge could converge to create new forms of representation for non-human beings in EU policymaking. How might we give voice to ecosystems and species in democratic processes? What could nature-inclusive policymaking or nature-centric indicators look like at scale? Can ecosystems and animals play active roles in policy implementation and monitoring? What would it take to treat nature as a political actor or policy stakeholder, rather than an object of regulation?
Exploratory Focus: One idea could be to prototype the concept of a Multispecies Council, starting with one ecological domain—for example: Council of the Ocean (whales, dolphins, fish, plankton) Council of the Forest (trees, fungi, insects, birds) The Council becomes both an imaginary prototype and a practical experiment: a deliberative space where different species’ needs, signals, and wellbeing data are interpreted and represented in policy discussions.
The aim is to move beyond symbolic gestures and explore practical, fair, and scalable mechanisms for nature’s (animals') participation in EU-level decisions—especially those concerning habitats, restoration, and infrastructure. Instead of anthropomorphising animals, the project investigates authentic channels of communication or “proxy-communication.” With this goal in mind, other ideas are very welcomed as well.