Short Abstract:

This roundtable probes some of the emerging frontiers of governance in which multispecies relations are increasingly the object of intense and often existential concern, surveillance and intervention.

Long Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened already keen anthropological interest in connections between animal diseases, human health and the environment. As governmental attention turns towards anticipating the next pandemic, planetary health initiatives that identify broken or damaged human-animal relations as the source of future zoonotic risk have been elevated from the niche interests of global health practitioners to household concepts. In much of the world, "One Health, One World" has become a guiding mantra not only to support vast economies of industrial animal production but to secure the very survival of humanity against future pandemics. The scope, let alone the implications, of this fundamental revision of how and why people and animals should be governed in a post-COVID world remains to be fully charted and cuts across concerns of rural livelihoods, global food security, geopolitical tensions and biodiversity conservation. This roundtable probes some of these emerging frontiers of governance in which multispecies relations are increasingly the object of intense and often existential concern, surveillance and intervention.