Performative citizens’ assembly where participants embodied current cows, future cows, and future human children to co-design a 2050 vision for just coexistence. Blending art and deliberation, it tested indirect interspecies representation in democratic decision-making.
Problems and Purpose
De-Mooo-cracy was developed in response to concerns about the exclusion of nonhuman animals from democratic decision-making processes related to sustainability and agricultural policy. As stated by the organisers, "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."
The project sought to explore whether indirect representation of nonhuman animals could be meaningfully tested within a citizens' assembly format. It staged a mock cow–human citizens' assembly in which human participants were assigned to represent current cows or future human children. The assembly was given a mandate to develop a future vision for how cows and humans might live justly and sustainably in the province of Gelderland in 2050, and to formulate policy measures to achieve that vision. The stated aims were to learn about the potential and limits of indirect representation of nonhuman animals in a citizens' assembly, and to explore whether cross-species perspective-taking could function as a transformative learning experience. The project was explicitly framed as an experimental and performative inquiry rather than a formal decision-making body with binding authority.
Background History and Context
De-Mooo-cracy was performed on 24 October 2023 during the Earth System Governance conference at Radboud University in Nijmegen. The deliberative scenario was territorially anchored in the Achterhoek region in the east of the Netherlands, described during the session as rural, characterised by dairy farming, nature areas, and nitrogen-related environmental challenges. The Netherlands has experienced sustained political debate concerning nitrogen emissions, livestock numbers, and agricultural transition, providing a direct policy context for the experiment.
Organising, Supporting, and Funding Entities
De-Mooo-cracy was initiated and led by Anne van Veen, an artist-researcher-activist working on human-animal relations, who conceptualised the project and designed the performance structure. Bram van Helvoirt, a researcher and lecturer in sustainable food systems and participatory governance at HAS University of Applied Sciences, contributed to preparation and facilitation of sessions and co-authored the evaluation report, providing expert commentary on the policy recommendations during the performance. Noel van Dooren, a landscape architect, researcher, and professor of Sustainable Foodscapes in Urban Regions at Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences, led a preparatory session on landscape and regional context in the Achterhoek. Leonie Cornips, a sociolinguistics researcher at the Meertens Institute (KNAW) and Professor of Language Culture at Maastricht University, whose work focuses on interspecies communication and cow language, provided commentary following the deliberation and presentation of policy recommendations during the public performance.
The project was developed within the framework of the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA) project "Transition to a Sustainable Food System in the Netherlands." The performance took place as an innovative session during the Earth System Governance conference. No separate funding line for the performance itself is specified in publicly available documentation; the evaluation report notes that there was no budget available to pay professional performers.
Participant Recruitment and Selection
Participants were actively and purposively recruited, with organisers seeking individuals with experience in amateur theatre or storytelling. This decision reflected several practical and methodological considerations: the need for comfort performing before an audience, affinity with perspective-taking exercises, willingness to engage in arts-based practices, and the ability to reflect on their own learning process. The absence of a budget for professional performers was also a factor. Despite outreach efforts, recruitment proved difficult and ultimately only six participants completed the project.
A seventh participant initially joined but withdrew after the first session because the content conflicted with their personal values and professional interests as a butcher. This withdrawal is explicitly noted in the evaluation report; the participant was not interviewed as part of the evaluation.
The six participants were not randomly selected. Most were in their forties or fifties; one was in their twenties. Five were women and one was a man. Four had extensive theatre experience, one had substantial storytelling experience, and one had no prior performance experience. None had previously participated in a citizens' assembly. All were concerned with animal welfare and/or animal rights, and all but one were vegetarian or vegan. The evaluation report describes the group as highly educated and progressive compared to the general population.
Due to the final group size, the original plan to represent four constituencies was adjusted. Rather than representing current humans, future humans, current cows, and future cows, the final assembly represented two groups: current cows (four participants) and future generation humans (two participants). The decision to allocate more representatives to cows was based on the view that cows are numerically more affected by policies governing cow-human relations. Each participant developed a fictional biography for a specific cow or future human child, selected or generated an image associated with that individual, and wore a pin button displaying this image during the assembly.
Methods and Tools Used
De-Mooo-cracy combined a citizens' assembly format with performative and arts-based methods. The assembly structure included a defined mandate, representation of designated constituencies, an 80% consent rule for recommendations to be considered adopted, public presentation of adopted measures, and deliberation and voting procedures during the final session.
Participants represented specific individuals rather than abstract categories, supported by fictional biography-writing, visual pin buttons, a repeated collective perspective-taking declaration, and movement between a "regular" deliberative space and a "theatrical" embodied space. Arts-based elements included theatre exercises, a staged talk show format, drawing, voice-over presentations, and embodied exercises aimed at imagining bodily experience.
The preparatory phase incorporated structured input from political philosophy on interspecies democracy, historical and ecological information about the Achterhoek region, conversations with experts on citizens' assemblies and on cow language, and literature on cross-species empathy and transformative learning. A site visit to a dairy farm holding dual-purpose cows served as an observational and experiential input. Sessions were documented in writing, drawing, and video formats, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with all six participants after the performance, recorded, transcribed, anonymised, and reviewed by participants prior to inclusion in the evaluation report.
What Went On
De-Mooo-cracy consisted of four preparatory sessions followed by a public performative citizens' assembly on 24 October 2023.
During the first session, participants representing cows examined information about dairy and meat production systems and reflected on bodily conditions they would prefer in a future scenario, documented through a staged talk show format in which the facilitator interviewed them in first person. Participants representing future generation humans discussed future diets and produced drawings and narrated presentations. The second session addressed the landscape of the Achterhoek through historical and ecological input from Noel van Dooren, after which participants collaboratively developed elements of a shared future vision covering land use, spatial arrangements, and coexistence. The third session focused on relations between cows and humans through theatre exercises simulating everyday encounters, and included a visit to a dairy farm in the Achterhoek where the farmer explained practices, participants observed and interacted physically with cows, and spent time with groups of cows without the farmer present. Observations from the farm visit informed subsequent discussions about bodily conditions, maternal separation, reproduction, and lifespan. The fourth preparatory session translated the developed future vision into concrete policy measures, grouped into three themes and deliberated using the 80% consent rule.
The public performative assembly opened with the perspective-taking ritual and an explanation of the mandate. The room was divided into a "regular space" for deliberating as assembly members and a "theatrical space" for embodied first-person speech as the represented individual; participants physically moved between these throughout the session. The assembly presented its future vision across three parts — bodies, landscape, and relations — with biographies read aloud and interwoven with discussion. Policy measures that had reached 80% consent in preparation were presented as adopted; those that had not were discussed publicly and voted on during the performance. Following the assembly, invited commentators Bram van Helvoirt and Leonie Cornips responded to the recommendations, and audience members were invited to ask questions.
Influence, Outcomes, and Effects
The principal output of De-Mooo-cracy was a set of policy recommendations developed during the preparatory sessions and finalised during the public assembly. Almost all received 100% consent.
Under the theme of achieving fewer, free-living cows, the assembly adopted measures including phasing out breeding combined with a farmer compensation scheme over a maximum of fifteen years, research into establishing a reservation where female cows could live until natural death, and provision for natural reproduction once the cow population was sufficiently reduced. Under subsidies and economic transition, adopted measures included financial compensation for farmers, a transition fund for plant-based and alternative crops or career changes, subsidies for education including vegan cooking, public procurement policies oriented toward whole-food plant-based food, and training of additional cow experts. Under cow-human relations, adopted measures included removing cows' status as legal property, a ban on killing cows except for euthanasia, courses in interspecies communication for children and politicians, establishing a living lab for cow-human coexistence in the Achterhoek, democratic voting options for children and cows, both direct and indirect representation of children and cows, recognition of resistance as a form of voting, stricter lobby regulations, and research on maintaining a stable cow population.
Post-performance commentary by Bram van Helvoirt described the recommendations as a comprehensive policy mix including regulations, subsidies, awareness-raising, research, and new democratic practices, and characterised them as differing from present-day policies, which he described as often short-term, fragmented, and anthropocentric. These remarks were presented as commentary during the event rather than as part of the assembly's formal output.
Participant reflections documented in the evaluation report indicate that writing detailed fictional biographies supported perspective-taking by grounding representation in a named individual rather than an abstract category. Participants expressed uncertainty about whether it is possible to accurately represent a cow's perspective, acknowledging that human interpretation inevitably shapes representation. Several described the farm visit as emotionally significant and affecting how they understood cows' living conditions. Participants reported various forms of personal reflection including increased awareness of cows as individuals, greater attention to bodily and relational dimensions of farming, and reflection on food choices. These are documented as self-reported learning outcomes; the report does not claim uniform transformation across participants.
At the time of publication, available documentation does not indicate that the policy recommendations were formally submitted to governmental authorities or that they directly influenced policy decisions. The assembly was framed as an experimental and performative inquiry rather than a binding decision-making body, and no evidence of formal institutional adoption or replication of the recommendations is provided in the available materials.
Analysis and Lessons Learned
De-Mooo-cracy generated coherent policy proposals, clarified the limits of indirect representation, and prompted participant reflection on political community and justice. Its primary contribution lies in testing the boundaries of who can be represented and how democratic legitimacy might be constructed beyond the human.
A central tension the experiment exposes is representation without formal authorisation. Participants spoke on behalf of named cows through biographies, ritual declarations, and first-person speech, generating high levels of collective consent. Yet legitimacy remained symbolic rather than institutional: no mechanism existed through which cows could authorise, contest, or hold representatives accountable, and participants themselves acknowledged uncertainty about whether their interpretations accurately reflected bovine needs or desires.
The initiative operated with high imaginative autonomy and minimal institutional embedding. This positioned it outside formal policy channels but enabled proposals that reconfigured property relations, democratic standing, and interspecies coexistence in ways that institutionally embedded processes may have constrained. The case highlights this as a design tension rather than a deficit: democratic experimentation at a distance from formal governance can expand political possibility, but its outputs remain explicitly experimental rather than actionable without deliberate pathways to institutional uptake.
Participant homogeneity — most were already sympathetic to animal welfare concerns — likely facilitated high levels of consent but limited the experiment's ability to test interspecies representation across divergent political and professional positions. The withdrawal of the participant who worked as a butcher points to a facilitation challenge as much as a recruitment one: the process may not yet have developed the tools to hold serious value conflict alongside the perspective-taking work. The evaluation report identifies several lessons for future experiments: the importance of small group size for depth of perspective-taking alongside its cost to representativeness; the value of combining embodied exercises with structured deliberation; the grounding effect of direct encounters such as farm visits; and the need to build in greater ideological diversity from the outset.
See Also
- Citizens’ Assemblies (Deliberative Mini-Publics)
- Interspecies Democracy
- Multispecies Justice
- Indirect Representation
- Prefigurative Politics
- Arts-Based Democratic Innovation
- Zoöp (method entry in participedia)
- Interspecies Council (method entry in participedia)
These entries provide conceptual or methodological points of comparison for the performative citizen’s assembly model used in De-mooo-cracy.
References
Van Veen, Anne. De-mooo-cracy! A Performative Experiment with a Cow–Human Citizen’s Assembly: Evaluation Report.(Year as listed in report).
De-mooo-cracy Transcript (publicly available in YouTube).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm86WtZP4Vk
Public commentary and discussion during Earth System Governance conference session (as documented in transcript).
External Links
https://annevanveen.com/de-mooo-cracy/
https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/handle/2066/305077/upload_in_progress_2066_305077.pdf?sequence=1
https://rcsc.substack.com/p/sustainability-roundup-29-september?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://www.viennaanimalstudies.com/post/envisioning-multispecies-futures-a-report-from-the-eacas-conference-2025
Notes
Illustration by Lena Winkel
Contributor Positionality Statements
This case entry was prepared by Claudia Fernandez de Cordoba (2026), founder of Living Imaginaries. Living Imaginaries is a social enterprise focused on reimagining how societies govern, relate, and live with more-than-humans. Working at the intersection of climate, biodiversity, food, health, and justice, it combines creative re-imagination with practical pathways for structural change. She is also a doctoral researcher at University College London, where her research examines more-than-human democratic innovation and biodiversity governance.
The contributor was not involved in designing, organising, or participating in De-mooo-cracy. The entry is based on publicly available evaluation reports, transcript materials, and related documentation. No interviews were conducted for this case, and the contributor did not hold any facilitative, advisory, or decision-making role within the initiative.
The case draws exclusively on documented materials and publicly available sources. Where transcripts or evaluation materials are referenced, they are treated as primary source accounts produced by organisers or participants.
Descriptive sections are grounded in documented findings and reported accounts. Interpretive analysis appears only in the Analysis section and is informed by the contributor’s broader academic research and practice-based work through Living Imaginaries.
This entry was developed as part of the project Developing a typology of emerging practices of nonhuman representation and participation, laying the groundwork for more-than-human democratic innovations, conducted in collaboration with the Centre for Deliberative Democracy, the Knowledge Network on Climate Assemblies (KNOCA), the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, Participedia, and the University of Westminster.
