Material things are not just passive recipients of human categories, meanings and values, nor mere subjects of human agency. Their particular characteristics and behaviours are formative of human–non-human relations. The common material properties of things, and the shared cognitive and phenomenological processes through which people interact with them, generate recurrent ideas and patterns of engagement in diverse cultural and historical contexts. Despite growing instrumentalism in human ‘management’ of the material world, and the emergence of new relational forms, these patterns persist.

The social sciences and humanities have become increasingly critical of the anthropocentrism that supports exploitative relations with the non‐human domain. This shift in positionality recognises that non‐human beings and ecosystems are not humankind's passive subjects but the co‐creators of shared lifeworlds. A logical consequence is a greater appreciation of the rights and interests of non‐human beings and ecosystems, both in law and in the decision‐making processes that shape human‐environmental relations. This requires some form of pan‐species democracy that simultaneously respects biocultural diversity. Drawing on ethnographic research on the River Stour in Dorset, this paper considers how we might reimagine the notion of community to encompass human and non‐human inhabitants in river catchment areas. It considers what ‘speaking for the river’ would entail, and what a river might want to say. Employing anthropological approaches to art and material culture, examining ‘what things do’, and the multi‐species ethnography that illuminates interspecies relations, this requires an imaginative leap, not into faux animism, but into serious consideration of the river as an active partner in human‐non‐human relations. This requires us to understand the river's properties and behaviours, and how it acts both creatively and destructively upon all of the living kinds that depend upon it—and vice versa. What does a river need to ensure its own flourishing and that of its dependent communities? This paper considers how ‘listening to the river’ enables the representation of its needs and interests in decision‐making processes.

The water sector has a major leadership role to play in addressing the global water crisis. How can it make the radical shifts in approach that are needed? This paper highlights the reality that the management of water, and the ways in which water flows are directed, reflects social relations of power, not just between human groups, but also between humankind and the non-human world. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research with indigenous communities and other water users in river catchments around the world, it considers alternate cultural worldviews that encourage more sustainable beliefs and practices, and asks how larger societies might make imaginative use of these in contemporary and future engagements with water. In a thought experiment intended to reposition human–non-human relations, it proposes a concept of ‘re-imagined communities’ advocating more collaborative forms of conviviality – living together – with other species. Opening the door to ideas about pan-species democracy, it calls for decision-making processes in which a wide range of expertise is brought together to exchange knowledge, with an explicit and practical remit to ‘speak for’ and promote the needs and interests of the non-human inhabitants of the ecosystems on which all living kinds depend.