Table 1 Composition of the jury
Notional 20 Actual jury
9–10 9
Sex Men
10–11 Women
7 18–29
Age 6–7
7 30–50
7–8 6
6–7 51+
3 Occupational group
Min 4 AB
3 Min 4
C1 5
C2 Min 4
4 DE
Min 4 4
1–2 Employment
2 Farmers managerowner
Farm workers 1–2
1 6
Urban 7
Residential district 3–4
3 Rural area 1
6–8 Rural area 2
4 3–4
2 Rural area 3
2–3 Of those in rural areas:
2 Larger settlements in Fens
Smaller settlements in Fens 2–3
1 Elsewhere in Fens
5–6 4
1–2 2
Elsewhere outside Fens Time resident in area
3–5 Resident up to 5 years
1 Of those in the Fens
Resident 20+ years 3–5
3 2–3
Members of one or more 2
Environmental organisations
able conflicts that may result Brown et al., 1995. On the other hand, advocates of representing the
public at large appear over-optimistic about the extent to which this is possible with a sample of
16. Some critics recognise this and maintain fur- ther that the inconsistency between a CJ’s recom-
mendations and general public opinion represents ‘perhaps the most significant limitation of the CJ
model’ Armour, 1996: 184. Crucially, however, achieving such consistency is the wrong objective.
The legitimacy — or ‘validation’ — of delibera- tive institutions such as CJs is not grounded in a
‘microcosm of the public’ capturing ‘the voice of the people’ Crosby, 1996; Crosby, in press, nor
in them capturing ‘a better reflection’ of public opinion than standard polls. Rather it arises
through argument and mutual acknowledgement among the participants Estlund, 1993, 1997;
Bohman, 1998. Thus unlike CVM, an assessment of the representativeness of the valuation process
is inseparable from an assessment of its content, in this case the competence of the deliberation.
6. The standard of deliberation
In assessing the standard of deliberation in a CJ, two different aspects of ‘competent delibera-
tion’ are often confused. A distinction must be drawn between whether untrained jurors are will-
ing and able to deliberate competently on com- plex policy questions over 4 days, and whether
some or any of the forms of ideal-type delibera- tion are in fact approached. Roughly, it is a divide
between the possibility and the actuality of com- petent deliberation. The distinction is not always
a clear one, but has didactic value.
6
.
1
. Acti6e participation In addressing the possibility of competent delib-
eration, we can state with confidence that the Ely jurors took the process seriously and participated
actively. All jurors became more interested in the question facing them as the 4 days progressed.
Although their capabilities to master complex in-
formation inevitably varied, in general nearly all jurors’ engagement with the question and the
process was very strong. This was evidenced, for instance, in the ability of some jurors to remem-
ber the small details of what had been said by witnesses several days previously. They were also
able to pick up on inconsistencies in witness pre- sentations. For example, in response to a question
about its cost, one advocate of a particular option claimed that the option would be ‘largely self-
managed’ reducing labour costs. But later the same witness maintained that the option would
‘create significant numbers of jobs’. The advocate had not tried to mislead the Jury; rather the point
is that the Jury were able to force the advocate to be more specific about the advantages proposed.
Of equal significance to this evidence is the change in attitudes within the advisory group,
many of whom had attended Jury hearings as observers in addition to studying the report.
While there existed a degree of scepticism among some members of the group before the hearings
regarding the ability of lay jurors to deliberate competently on the question facing them, this was
entirely absent when the group met following the hearings.
The jurors particularly welcomed the time available to give careful consideration to the ques-
tions raised. In marked contrast, when asked on the final day after the official end of the Jury to
consider allocating a given public expenditure budget among a range of projects including wet
Fen creation, the jurors unanimously rejected the exercise as ‘too hurried’ and an ‘insult’ to their
earlier careful work. Although this exercise posed a broader question than the jurors had been con-
sidering because it invited an ordering of priorities between both ‘environmental’ and ‘non-environ-
mental’ objectives, it was in this respect very similar to the questions faced by CVM respon-
dents. The point seemed clearly made by the jurors that even with 4 days of hearings allowing
them to become relative ‘experts’ on an issue, they still did not have the confidence to tackle a CV
survey.
In a typical CJ, the commissioning body makes clear to all parties in advance that it will treat the
findings and recommendations of the Jury seri- ously, and if it fails to act on them, promises to
explain to the jurors why the recommendations have been rejected. A ‘contract’ a token of com-
mitment rather than a legally binding document is often signed to that effect. In the Ely Jury, such
a ‘contract’ was employed, but it was the advisory group — because there was no commissioning
body — which promised to treat the findings of the Jury seriously. Moreover, the contract had
made clear that the advisory group had no direct power to act on the Jury’s recommendations. As
soon as jurors recalled this powerlessness, they became suspicious, and reiterated their suspicions
in the focus group, that the CJ was not a means to the end of making some decision, but an end in
itself. Many were unconvinced that the Jury was, or contributed to, real decision-making processes.
Moreover, a few witnesses conveyed the impres- sion that some decisions, over whether to fund
some of the options, had taken place or would do so regardless of the views of the Jury. This was
misleading and unhelpful. Finally, the apathy reg- istered in the focus group towards the Jury report
seems related to these problems. The jurors seemed unclear, despite the ‘contract’, about
who the report was for, where it would go, and what its purpose was. This relates to the questions
of control of the process and trust discussed be- low.
It remains unclear how far these problems are particular to the context of the Ely Jury and
would be mitigated by a commissioning body with decision-making power. But if the perception of a
valuation process
as an ‘academic exercise’
triggers a
substantial disengagement
from the process, then CVM too would appear to be
undermined. The
problem of
respondents not taking a CV questionnaire seriously because
they do not believe that it will contribute to a decision-making procedure is widely recognised in
the CVM literature. However, that literature concentrates on the ‘realism’ of the scenario
presented to respondents, rather than on the rejec- tion of the valuation process per se as being an
‘academic’, implausible means of decision sup- port.
6
.
2
. Deliberation in the Ely Jury First and foremost, we recommend that a
reader who wishes to form a judgement about the standard of deliberation in the Ely Jury should
begin with a careful study of the Jury’s report Aldred and Jacobs, 1997. As noted above, the
report was fully endorsed by all jurors. The en- dorsement was important: the report aimed to
show the jurors’ own understanding of the issues and constituted the Jury’s ‘official’ recommenda-
tions to local stakeholders. Such a report is the usual principal ‘output’ of a CJ, and for most CJs
should be the starting point for an assessment of deliberation. Our comments here are necessarily
constrained by space and draw on the transcripts of the Jury proceedings, the report of the proceed-
ings endorsed by the jurors, the evaluation ques- tionnaires completed individually by each juror
on the final day, the focus group sessions with some jurors conducted one week later, and our
direct experience as participants in the process.
We believe the Jury’s findings show the care and attention with which the jurors approached
the question and offer tentative evidence of con- vergence of views among the jurors over the four
days. In particular, we had proposed a number of hypotheses about the nature of deliberation in a
CJ Jacobs, 1997:
1. Arguments are couched in terms of the public good, not self-interest.
2. Jurors are exposed to, and engage with, a wide range of points of view, much wider than if
their opinion is sought using survey techniques such as CVM.
3. Jurors develop a concern for others and shift their positions towards less self-interested
ones, perhaps through mutual trust leading to a sense of ‘community’.
In general the Ely Jury lent support to the first two hypotheses. Confirmation of the third hy-
pothesis is a difficult task. Certainly some jurors reported having changed their views over the
course of the four days, but it remains unclear whether this was the result of genuine delibera-
tion. Even if not, there was evidence of increased awareness of ‘community’. Through meeting each
other, jurors found that, contrary to expectations generated by the media, citizens with very differ-
ent backgrounds and experiences can be reason- able and open-minded. This led some jurors to
retreat from their initial positions that had been defined in very oppositional terms.
5
6
.
2
.
1
. Control of the process The picture that strongly emerges is of a CJ
which very much became the jurors’ own, shaped by them and developing in ways which we could
not and did not wish to control. In particular, both the jurors’ perception of the question facing
them and the nature of their deliberation about it moved off in directions that took the Jury beyond
direct discussion of the options facing them. The point here is not that the Jury ignored the ques-
tion which they did only rarely, but that they approached it in ways that clearly contrast with
the kind of scientific enquiry with which environ- mental policy-makers are familiar.
For example, the focus group suggested, and the stakeholder observers at the Jury sessions
agreed, that the jurors decided early on that the CJ was ‘really about the environment’. The jurors
seemed to develop an economyenvironment dis- tinction as a simplifying heuristic to interpret
information presented to them. A further ten- dency among jurors to focus on local andor daily
concerns as noted above became apparent in the small group sessions, particularly those that were
unmoderated. Thus the small group discussions were often centred around the nature of contem-
porary food shopping and its impact on farming practices, and nature conservation understood as
preservation of higher mammals. The working question facing the jurors was transformed into
something like ‘How much does nature conserva- tion matter to us in Ely, day-to-day?’ — rather
than ‘At what point should the trade-off between the economic benefits of intensive farming and
the demands for conservation be struck?’
Another instance of the jurors’ control of the process is that deliberation, once begun, extended
beyond the bounds of the CJ institution. Jurors
5
In this sense, participation in deliberative processes such as CJs may help counter the increasing ‘privatisation’ of social
relations in the UK.
referred in the focus groups to their active deliber- ation on the ‘rest day’ away from the Jury room
between days 3 and 4 of the official agenda. That the CJ process is inevitably open-ended
makes it harder, and less appropriate, to pursue the simple question of how far the deliberation
‘during the Jury’ informed decision-making. The focus groups also revealed the extent of delibera-
tion after the hearings had finished. One juror noted that his views had altered substantially
since the end of the hearings and warned that should he be asked to meet stakeholders to dis-
cuss the Jury report, he would disagree with parts of it.
6
.
2
.
2
. Rationality The jurors conceptualise the question facing
them, and organise their response, in ways that differ radically from the picture of the rational
deliberating agent which many researchers in en- vironmental valuation implicitly employ in insti-
tutional design. The picture of the agent that is challenged is not just the narrow idealisation of
‘economic man’ dominant in much orthodox eco- nomics, but the broader idealisation offered by
some deliberative theorists — perhaps Haber- masian man. A number of examples illustrate this
point.
In discussing the employment which might be generated by the four options, the jurors stated
that the creation of ten jobs was ‘worthless’ while the creation of 100 jobs was clearly perceived to
be valuable. Such judgements pose problems for many standard accounts of rationality.
6
The unusual funding context in the Ely Jury entailed that the different options were not in
direct competition with one another — different options appealed to different sources of funding,
and in some cases the money was already avail- able to be spent. The budget constraint did not
bite over the four options being considered. Yet the Jury rejected option 2, the Fen centre, when
they could have afforded this as well as options 1 and 3. In terms of orthodox economics, the Jury
chose an interior solution rather than one on the budget line. Assuming that option 2 had non-neg-
ative utility for the Jury, their rejection of option 2 was ‘irrational’.
The jurors’ use of information presented to them also conflicts with some common accounts
of rationality. On these accounts, the jurors ap- pear ‘biased’ towards information that is local
daily and place insufficient weight on abstract information. Very detailed non-abstract informa-
tion fares little better. Rather than assessing the information that ‘expert’ witnesses presented, the
witnesses themselves were assessed. More pre- cisely, experts were assessed on the basis of their
sincerity, commitment to their argument, commu- nication skills and the credibility of the institution
of which they were a member. For example, the credibility of the option 1 advocate was high
because more people had heard of the conserva- tion charity he represented than had heard of the
organisations of the other option advocates, and because the option 1 advocate was regarded as an
exceptionally charismatic speaker. Although the jurors’ approach to interrogating the knowledge
claims of experts and others arguably undermines their ability to make satisfactory decisions on
both the mainstream economic and Habermasian accounts of rationality, it does not do so on the
Aristotelian account.
7
This encourages citizens to recognise their inability to evaluate certain claims
in the absence of specialist training, and concen- trate on discerning on whose authority they can
rely for such an evaluation. Thus the question of
6
Orthodox rational choice theory can deal with such prefer- ences by noting that ‘creation of ten jobs’ is not the same
alternative when 90 jobs have already been created, than when none have been created. Thus there is no violation of the
consistency axioms when ten jobs yield no utility for the chooser, while ten times ten jobs yield positive utility. How-
ever the move to re-define apparently identical alternatives as different because of different choice contexts restricts the
explanatory power of the theory Sen, 1993, 1995b. A less technical point is that when the jurors said ‘worthless’ they
might not have meant precisely that — but this is an interpre- tative problem that equally troubles CVM.
7
Although it goes against the Habermasian account of rationality Habermas, 1987; Kant, 1987, this emphasis on
assessing the sources of claims rather than the claims them- selves is a key element of the Aristotelian account Aristotle,
Metaphysics. We are grateful to John O’Neill for this point O’Neill, 1993: Ch. 8.
the trust of jurors in witnesses and others is central to an understanding of the nature of
deliberation.
6
.
2
.
3
. Trust A major finding to emerge from the Ely Jury is
that jurors are far from naive about the political processes involved in making decisions about land
use. Most jurors arrived on the first day with a high degree of cynicism about our neutrality as
‘organisers’ and about the extent to which their views would be seriously considered. Once they
knew that we had no direct decision-making power or influence, and were advised by local
stakeholders, the jurors shifted their suspicions to the motives of the stakeholders — ‘they’re all
politicians’ — and in particular the uses to which their report would be put. Several examples reveal
the jurors developing tactics in an attempt to increase the influence of the Jury’s views on pol-
icy-making. A number of jurors strongly in favour of option 1 on conservation grounds wished to
construct more ‘economic’ arguments in its favour because arguing for option 1 solely on conserva-
tion grounds was perceived as reducing the likeli- hood that the Jury would be taken seriously.
Otherwise ‘They stakeholdersdecision-makers will think we’re all eco-warriors. Loonies.’ Also,
in developing their final recommendations for op- tion 1 as noted above, many jurors believed that
the size of the nature reserve would be bargained down in political negotiations and so argued that
the Jury should recommend the largest possible size, even though this was not necessarily its first
preference. This pattern of abstaining or not rec- ommending one’s ‘first-best’ choice for strategic
reasons was repeated in several other places by some jurors.
Lack of trust was also evident in the jurors’ insistence that the body that would distribute
funds to farmers under their proposals for option 3 should not be run by government or local
government appointees. Finally, in the focus group several jurors aired their suspicions, asking
directly ‘What’s it all for?’ and ‘Who are you working for?’ This led to a request for the jurors
to present the report in person to the advisory group of stakeholders and policy-makers, rather
than through us. There was genuine concern about a ‘waste of money’ if the report was ig-
nored. Clearly, lack of trust was a significant factor in the jurors’ desire to take and retain
control of the process as discussed above.
Commentators have emphasised that CJ and other deliberative means of public participation in
decision-making have the potential to ‘rebuild’ the trust of the public in policy-makers. However,
evidence from the study suggests that this poten- tial will only be fully realised if a CJ agenda is
open and the CJ has genuine decision-making power, or at least, there exists the obligation
among policy-makers to justify their actions to a Jury if they choose to ignore its recommenda-
tions. Another possibility to emerge from the study is the rebuilding of trust in the other direc-
tion: by policy-makers in the public. Deliberative institutions such as the Ely CJ have given policy-
makers an insight into the potential of citizens to make careful, informed judgements on complex
questions. This could counteract the undoubted lack of confidence of many policy-makers in citi-
zens’ decision-making abilities, a doubt that seems to have been encouraged by the generally un-
reflective views of citizens reported to policy-mak- ers through market-research methods.
7. Conclusion: the role of citizens’ juries
