Living systems, critical friendship and applied inquiry
Spiralweb Stewardship Association is forming a small, non-governing Advisory Board. Its purpose is to bring independent questions, complementary knowledge and critical friendship into work that connects living systems, regenerative practice, local stewardship and institutional responsibility.
The Board is at the beginning. It is not yet a mature body, and this page is an invitation rather than a finished mandate.
Spiralweb works across different places, relationships and forms of knowledge. No person, discipline or organisation can see the whole field clearly. Good intentions, strong relationships and coherent language are not sufficient safeguards on their own.
We therefore need people who can come close enough to understand the work, remain independent enough to question it, and care enough to help it become more truthful. We call this critical friendship: invited accountability without borrowed authority.
The Advisory Board will not govern projects, communities or fields. It will not decide funding, replace technical work or speak on behalf of people, traditions, species or ecosystems. Its role is to ask better questions, identify what or who may be missing, and help Spiralweb remain open to evidence, disagreement and correction.
The emerging Board will bring different forms of experience into conversation around three connected questions.
What is already living in a place? What is threatened, missing or insufficiently understood? What should be protected, restored or allowed to recover without intervention?
This includes biodiversity, conservation, threatened species and Red List knowledge, wildlife habitats, ecological connectivity, restoration and rewilding.
What practice fits the actual land, water, climate, ecology and work that a place can sustain?
This includes agroecology, agroforestry and food forests, earthworks and water care, soil and plant health, regenerative land management, food security and the long-term labour needed to hold these practices.
How can people, knowledge and resources be supported without exhausting stewards, flattening difference or purchasing local authority?
This includes viable livelihoods, local and practitioner knowledge, scientific inquiry, governance, culture, accountability and the institutional conditions through which support can travel responsibly. We also hope to learn from situated, Indigenous, biocultural and culturally rooted ways of knowing through relationships in which authority, consent and context remain visible.
These are fields of attention, not committees or claims that one adviser should cover an impossible range of expertise.
Advisory Board Member and Critical Friend
Regenerative systems · social innovation · environmental governance · place-based transformation
Dr. Abid Mehmood is Senior Lecturer in International Planning and Sustainability at Cardiff University's School of Geography and Planning. His research connects social innovation, environmental governance, climate and disaster resilience, social cohesion, and local and regional development across Global South and Global North settings.
His work on regenerative place-shaping examines how learning, lived experience, social relations and regenerative action can connect people and places in transformative practice. He also mentored the REGenPLACE postdoctoral research fellowship, which explored regenerative land practices in Australia, Bhutan and Wales through place-based, transdisciplinary and cross-cultural inquiry.
Within Spiralweb, his contribution is especially relevant where regenerative systems, local knowledge, social relations and institutional forms meet. His role is personal and advisory; it does not imply endorsement or institutional representation by Cardiff University.
One confirmed member is a beginning, not a complete Board.
As relationships develop, we hope to invite complementary critical friends with grounded experience in areas such as biodiversity and conservation, agroecology and regenerative land practice, water and earthworks, food forests and agroforestry, local stewardship and livelihoods, and the ethical relationship among scientific, situated and culturally rooted knowledge.
We will name people only after they have agreed, and we will not treat identity, geography or affiliation as a substitute for relationship, competence or legitimate standing.
Spiralweb Stewardship Association is a Danish legal and financial body working through relationships with people and places elsewhere. This creates responsibilities and asymmetries that good intentions do not remove.
The Danish Association holds responsibility for the flows it opens. It does not hold authority over the places towards which those flows move.
The Advisory Board may help us notice when documentation is being confused with competence, expertise with authority, coherence with legitimacy, or support with hidden steering. Connection is not consent; legibility is not legitimacy. It may recommend further inquiry, correction, restraint or pause. Named people and legitimate bodies remain responsible for decisions and consequences.
The Board is advisory, not operational. Spiralweb and its field relationships remain responsible for project development, agreements, fundraising, technical work, documentation and follow-through. Substantial work beyond occasional advice must be separately agreed and, when resources allow, fairly compensated.
The Advisory Board will grow gradually through real relationships and real questions. Its form, composition and public language remain correctable as Spiralweb's responsibilities become more concrete.
We welcome careful conversation with people who recognise this spirit of critical friendship, or who can help us see an important absence in the field we are forming.
Contact: contact@spiralweb.earth