Field Dialogue #5 — Obuntu Comes Home - Regrowing the Web of Relations a Wetland Once Held Together

In Kampala’s Kiwaatule suburb, a community is rebuilding the capacity to listen to a wetland - and giving her a seat in the decisions that shape her future.

Kiwaatule sits on the edge of Kampala, wrapped around a wetland called Nalubaaga that is 70 to 80 percent built over. A regenerative development cooperative is forming in which the wetland herself holds shares, with voting rights weighted by land rather than money, her perspective carried into the room by people trained to listen and reflect her experience rather than speak for her. Getting to that point took many months of dialogues, most of which never mentioned governance at all.

In this fifth Field Dialogue of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox, we spoke with Abdul Semakula, founder of Regenar Development Initiative, about the process behind that cooperative - the long listening that preceded it, the fears it had to move through, the mechanics of a governance structure built on land rather than capital, and what it takes, in practice, for a wetland to participate in a decision.

Find the audio track of this conversation, and the written synthesis on our Substack: https://repatterningcollective.substack.com/p/field-dialogue-5-obuntu-comes-home