On Monday 28 September 2026, some thirty nature directors, business leaders, lawyers and academics gathered at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, for the “Nature on the Board” workshop. Vivoices was represented by Frantz Gault and Niels de Fraguier.

A day to shape an emerging field

Organised by Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, the day had a clear ambition: to bring together experiences of representing nature on boards and to draw shared lessons from them.

Nathalie Seddon opened the discussions by placing nature governance within the wider dynamic of movement building. Following insights from the field, a session was devoted to building the field itself: Vivoices took part through our co-founder Niels de Fraguier, alongside Lawyers for Nature and the Earth Law Center, with responses from Jen M. Lucey, Benjamin Franta and Juliane Reinecke.

The afternoon gave the floor to nature directors themselves, from Faith In Nature, House of Hackney, the National Infrastructure Commission for Wales, Northern Playground (Norway) and Norsys (France), including testimony from our co-founder Frantz Gault. The day closed with a collective workshop to build a shared “playbook”.

Vivoices’ experience at the heart of the discussions

For Vivoices, the event was an opportunity to share the experiences under way in France and internationally, and to compare them with those of our British and Norwegian counterparts.

Frantz Gault, author of La Nature au travail, spoke about his role as nature director on the board of the Norsys group, a pioneering arrangement in France. Niels de Fraguier, Secretary-General of Veolia’s Future Generations Committee, brought the perspective of a practitioner of long-term governance bodies in large companies.

These discussions confirmed a strong intuition: initiatives that emerged separately, in several countries, are converging. They now stand to gain from getting to know one another, comparing their methods and building common reference points.

Four key takeaways

• Nature as a stakeholder in governance. When nature has a voice, an organisation must reconsider its decisions whenever nature’s interests are at stake.

• Living experiments. Nature guardians, nature directors, proxies, participation rights, mandatory reconsideration: each of these mechanisms prefigures other forms of governance.

• A practice rooted in organisational reality. In sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s sense, these institutions are visionary: they challenge the assumption that only humans and shareholders can govern. And they are real, because they are already at work in boardrooms today.

• From risk to paradigm shift. Nature governance invites organisations to move beyond risk management alone and to rethink their relationship with the living systems on which they depend.

Thank you to the organisers, all the speakers and the partner organisations for such a rich and inspiring day.

Would you like to bring nature into your governance? Discover our Nature Director training or get in touch. And join us on 8 December for our annual conference, “Gouverner avec les vivants” (Governing with the Living).