De-mooo-cracy will be performed during the Earth System Governance conference on Oct. 24 at 3pm. The livestream can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm86WtZP4Vk

De-Mooo-cracy! A performative experiment with a cow-human citizen’s assembly

Nonhuman animals are stakeholders in sustainability transformations, but are generally not included as such. In addition, justice perspectives are often limited to justice for humans. At the same time, political philosophers increasingly advocate an interspecies democracy with (in)direct forms of representation of nonhuman animals to achieve multispecies justice. Interspecies democratic practices are a huge leap from where we currently are and are therefore difficult to imagine. In this innovative session we use art to push the boundaries of what is seen as possible by performing an experiment with interspecies democracy. Specifically, we hold a (fictional) citizen’s assembly in which future generations of cows and humans are represented by current human citizens.

Our cow-human citizen’s assembly is tasked to develop a vision for how cows and humans will live justly and sustainably in the province of Gelderland in 2043, and to use back casting to develop the policy measures needed to achieve this future. For this, we ask humans living in Gelderland to represent themselves, current cows, future cows, or future humans. In preparatory meetings, artistic methods and expert sessions help the citizens prepare their vision and policy proposals. Activities such as storytelling, embodied exercises, and perspective-taking rituals aid participants in attuning to and embodying the perspectives of the group they represent. During the innovative session, the groups come together and perform their final deliberation.

Aims

• Learn about the potential and limits of indirect representation of nonhuman animals in a
  citizen’s assembly. To what extent are current citizens able to attune to the needs and
  desires of future cows and humans?
• Learn about the effects of cross-species perspective-taking on the citizen-performers:
  could this be a transformative learning experience? Can such democratic and/or artistic
  practices be an instrument of value and belief change?