The world is intraconnected. Climate, biodiversity, geopolitics, and social cohesion are not isolated domains: they are expressions of deeply entangled realities. And in many parts of the world, there is a rising aspiration to reweave the relational fabric of how we understand and inhabit the world together, while much is in turmoil.
This moment is calling us to move beyond inherited assumptions of separation – between humans and nature, individuals and communities, present and future – and to resurface a sense of ourselves as fundamentally relational beings. It is a call to reimagine our economies, institutions, and ways of living as intrinsically embedded within living systems, shaped by interdependence and continuity.
In this light, the question of leadership shifts substantially. It is no longer enough to make existing systems slightly greener, or more inclusive or any other type of incremental improvement. What is called for, when taking this call seriously, is a more foundational form of leadership grounded in a renewed understanding of who we are – together – and how we shape our decisions, interventions and actions by how we show up: being in relationship with each other, with the more-than-human world, with the unfolding of time, and an intraconnected understanding of issues, sectors and places. This kind of leadership does not simply respond to complexity. It arises from a deeper care for coherence with life itself.
Caring as Nature, not for Nature
Many leadership approaches ask the question ‘how to move people towards a (joint) vision. Meaning, how to create some sort of movement in a human collective, creating direction, alignment and commitment, all in relation to an organisation and its vision. A 2025 paper by Luea and Anaïs, co-leads of the World Ethic Forum, takes quite a different angle on the question of leadership. Their framework, which they call ‘Ecocentric Leadership as Stewardship’, comes from a different ontological grounding (ecocentrism) and proposes that leadership extends beyond the organisational context towards stewarding processes unfolding within embedded ecosystems that include human and more-than-human elements – working with all the elements of an ecosystem to increase its overall coherence and health.
In line with this, they focus on the type of leadership needed when working towards systems change or eco-social transformation. This requires tending to the context-specific dynamics and relationships within a group, including the more-than-human, as well as being explicit about which worldview is intended to be given shape together, and instead of moving towards a vision, being dedicated to an inquiry.
Their framework is grounded in the intention to center the ontological dimension, which touches on what we believe reality is, and how we give expression to that. If we genuinely understand humans as nature, not managers of it, not observers of it, but as nature itself, then a responsibility comes with that ontological shift. Leadership cannot remain human-centric, or anchored to a vision held within an organisational logic. Something else is necessary. Humans need to step into our role as stewards of the ecosystems around us, caring for their integrity and functionality as our function within nature.
The paper makes an important distinction here. What we need is not leadership that ‘cares for nature’, in the sense that a human subject would tend to an external object. What we need instead is a form of leadership that understands itself as nature. Caring from inside the web. That shift is subtle, but its implications are vast. What our times call for is not more ethically sound or emotionally attuned stewards of a world that humans stand apart from.
A Commitment to Collective Transformation
Ecocentric leadership is not something you cultivate on your own. It is not about a single person doing some sort of inner work in order to feel a deep sense of intraconnectedness, and then leading a group from that point. It is something for the collective to do together.
Concretely, this means continuous practice, honest reflection, and willingness to work with one’s own inherited patterns and those of others. This includes trauma dynamics at the personal, intergenerational, and collective level. None of this is ‘soft’ work. It might be among the most demanding things a group can undertake together.
A Framework With Ten Dimensions
The paper proposes ten dimensions of Ecocentric Leadership as Stewardship, expanding on empirical work from April, Kukard and Peters. They do not form a full sequence of steps. Rather, they might be described as ingredients for this approach, or a way of mapping the territory. However, we see the holding of an ecocentric worldview and relational ontology as the underlying layer. This is the ground from which all the other dimensions grow:
- Connecting with land, place, and the subtle: honouring our interspecies connection and the geographical place we find ourselves in, including local knowledge
- Personal mastery: commitment to a continuous practice of inner work
- Personal intention: clarity of intention and commitment through being and acting
- Fostering relationships and transformative learning: caring for mutual relationships across diverse stakeholders and creating alignment in diversity
- Valuing diversity and sharing of power: purposefully seeking out, valuing and connecting different voices and perspectives
- Working with clear guiding questions: shared inquiry and commitment to intergenerational, intragenerational and interspecies justice
- Taking risks and embracing complexity: bravely navigating uncertainty and ambiguity and giving space to emergence
- Vulnerability and maturity: acting from a place of connection with a sense of belonging and being open to learning
- Raising awareness: embodying Leadership as Stewardship and showing up collectively for the common good
- Embracing uncertainty and open results: demonstrating commitment and urgency through perseverance
A few practices stand out as particularly resonant to foster those ingredients in context.
- Working with guiding questions rather than shared visions, to remain in inquiry and resist the pull toward solutionism.
- Embracing uncertainty and open results, to move away from predetermined outcomes.
- Valuing diversity and sharing power, not as a procedural commitment but as a lived practice that extends to the more-than-human world.
The full framework, with all ten dimensions, as well as the five-layer conceptual structure in which they are nested, is detailed in the paper.
What This Looks Like in Practice
In addition to the framework, the paper shares two specific instances where this form of leadership as stewardship was manifested.
The first is an ongoing, strategic partnership between the World Ethic Forum and the World Future Council. Those two organisations have aligned goals, but quite different cultures and different ways of working. Tensions surfaced early on in the course of the partnership. The WEFo’s inquiry-based, ontologically grounded approach was not always immediately legible to WFC members, who are more oriented toward solutions and policy impact. Some found a vibrant connection, but others struggled. Yet, over time, something moved. Both sides were willing to stay with the discomfort, witness each other’s vulnerabilities, and let the relationship do its work. This ability to hold the tension without forcing a resolution produced a real shift. In particular, the WFC deepened its existing commitment to the rights of future generations and of nature, and began listening more attentively to youth voices across its work.
The second instance is of a different kind. In 2024, a local citizen with deep multigenerational ties to the valley where WEFo gathered for the initial three years was invited into the Firekeeper Circle. That villager took some local clay from the foot of a nearby glacier (Morteratsch) and worked it into a flute that opened the 2024 Firekeeper gathering. This was a symbolic gesture: the land itself, including a human lineage rooted in it, was present at the threshold of an important gathering, physically and sonically manifesting a form of leadership that connects with land, place, and the subtle.
Building a Sanctuary for Radically Shared Aliveness
Moving towards this form of ecocentric leadership is not an easy feat. For this work to happen, one critical condition is that there are safe-enough spaces. Containers where people can genuinely enter a liminal space: where the old no longer holds, where the new is not yet here, and where something different can emerge. This includes trauma work, and rewiring colonial patterns, and rebuilding a relationship with the more-than-human, and transcending deeply ingrained dynamics of divisions and fragmentations.
The World Ethic Forum is a live experiment to build such a sanctuary for radically shared aliveness.