tor. On the final day the jurors reach conclusions and make recommendations, which are compiled
into a report to the public authorities. CJs are a new way of involving the public in the
decisions of public authorities. They seek to go beyond more limited processes of consultation
with the public on policy questions, such as public opinion surveys and invited responses to govern-
ment policy proposals. In a CJ, members of the public are given both the time and the informa-
tion to deliberate fully on the issues in question. The premise behind this method is that, given
enough time and information, ordinary people can make decisions about complex policy issues.
Although not conclusive, the evidence from previ- ous juries is positive Renn et al., 1995a,b; Coote
and Lenaghan, 1997; Kuper, 1997; Smith and Wales, 1999; Crosby, in press: jurors approach
the task as responsible citizens and reach mea- sured, well-thought-out conclusions. The idea is
not to replace or by-pass existing democratic structures, but to strengthen the democratic pro-
cess by including within it the considered views of a cross-section of members of the public. CJs
represent an attempt to provide an institutional setting for genuine deliberation by members of the
public on a public policy question, and so draw directly on the increasingly influential literature
on deliberative democracy a selection is: Rawls, 1971; Dahl, 1982; Schmitt, 1985; Elster, 1986;
Cohen, 1989; Dryzek, 1990; Fishkin, 1991; Miller, 1992; Bohman, 1996; Bohman and Rehg, 1997;
Bohman, 1998; Elster, 1998. However, the use of deliberative institutions to support environmental
decision-making has so far received more limited discussion Brown et al., 1995; Gunderson, 1995;
Renn et al., 1995a,b; O’Hara, 1996; Coote and Lenaghan, 1997; Jacobs, 1997; Kuper, 1997;
Sagoff, 1998; Rippe and Schaber, 1999; Smith and Wales, 1999; Crosby, in press.
CJs have been developed in the UK in recent years by the Institute for Public Policy Research
Coote and Lenaghan, 1997, in the United States by the Jefferson Institute Crosby, 1996; Crosby,
in press, and in Germany by Peter Dienel Renn et al., 1995a. UK juries have considered various
questions of health policy and provision, local planning issues and other policy issues of local
concern. Before the Cambridgeshire jury de- scribed in this paper, no UK jury had directly
addressed an environmental policy question. The plan of this paper is as follows. Section 2
describes a CJ which we organised, moderated Jacobs and facilitated Aldred. Section 3 de-
scribes the jury’s conclusions and recommenda- tions
in detail.
Section 4
discusses some
methodological issues which arose during our in- volvement with the Ely jury. Sections 5 and 6
explore two of the central criticisms which have been levelled at CJs: they are unrepresentative and
the deliberation they involve is inadequate to address the question posed satisfactorily. These
two tests of representativeness and satisfactory deliberation are assessed in turn.
2
A concluding section comments on the role and purpose of CJs.
2. The Ely citizens’ Jury
In July 1997, we organised a CJ in Ely, Cam- bridgeshire, UK, to address the question:
What priority, if any, should be gi6en to the creation of wetlands in the Fens
?
3
We had three principal objectives in designing the Ely CJ:
To evaluate CJs, in general, as processes of public participation and decision-aiding.
To examine the nature and quality of the delib- erative process generated by the Ely CJ.
To assess and interpret the environmental val- ues exhibited by the jurors.
The Ely Jury was ‘free-standing’ in the sense that it was not directly commissioned by any
2
An alternative test invokes standards of fairness and com- petence Renn et al., 1995a, which overlap with, but do not
correspond to the categories proposed here. Very briefly, ‘fairness’ involves two ideals: equal access to the jury repre-
sentativeness and equal chance to express one’s views during the jury satisfactory deliberation. ‘Competence’ corresponds
quite closely to assessing the standard of deliberation, but does so within an explicit framework of appealing to Habermasian
ideals.
3
‘The Fens’ is a large area near to Ely that is presently largely arable farming land, but it takes its name from its
former character before drainage. ‘Fen’ is flat, low-lying, marshy land.
particular public body which agreed to act on its recommendations. But the organisation of the
Jury was aided by an ‘advisory group’ of inter- ested parties, consisting of representatives of local
government, local residents, nature conservation charities and regulatory bodies, and the National
Farmers’ Union. Several of the members of the advisory group had been involved in a local pro-
ject which sought to promote the creation of wetlands in the Fens, but others were not, and
some members of the group indeed regarded this project with considerable scepticism. The mem-
bers of the advisory group could not commit themselves to be bound by the Jury’s conclusions,
but agreed to receive the report and to take its recommendations seriously.
The question that was put to the Jury was developed in collaboration with and agreed to by
the advisory group, and was intended to be neu- tral regarding the role and importance of wetlands
in the Fens. The advisory group determined the options to be put to the Jury, assisted in planning
the agenda and determining the criteria for Jury composition making the principal decisions on
these issues, and endorsed the moderator and facilitators.
2
.
1
. The jurors The Jury consisted of 16 members of the public
from the local area. A market research firm was appointed to recruit the members of the Jury
through house-to-house visits. In determining the membership of most participatory decision proce-
dures, there is a persistent tension between repre- senting the interests of different stakeholders and
attempting to capture the demographic andor other characteristics of the relevant ‘lay’ con-
stituency as a whole. Our approach to determin- ing the criteria to give to the market research
agency was somewhat different to that in previous CJs, but essentially, the aim was to ensure that all
relevant perspectives on the question under con- sideration were given the opportunity to be voiced
on the Jury. It is not easy to summarise our approach any further here — more detail is given
in Section 4. The exact information provided to members of
the public when seeking to recruit them as jurors was given careful thought. With too little infor-
mation, potential jurors will struggle to treat the exercise as a serious one and be unwilling to
commit 4 days of their time. With too much information, for instance discussing the environ-
mental nature of the Jury’s subject, a self-selection bias would be introduced, attracting individuals
with a particular interest in environmental ques- tions. In the recruitment process, therefore, poten-
tial jurors were told that the Jury would ‘discuss issues that are important matters of concern to
people living locally. These issues will include farming, job creation, tourism, wildlife and the
environment in Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and the Fens. The Jury is supported by Cambridgeshire
and Norfolk County Councils and a group of other public bodies.’
Members of the Jury were not required to know anything about the issue in advance. They were
told: ‘To be a member of a CJ, you need no special training or experience. You are being
asked to contribute your views and opinions as an ordinary member of the local community.’ In
return for committing four days of their time, each juror was paid £200, plus travelling expenses.
All members of the Jury signed a ‘contract’ on the first day in which they agreed to attend each day
and to participate fully.
2
.
2
. The Jury process An agenda was presented to the Jury at the
beginning of the first day, but it was made clear to the jurors that, in the interest of addressing the
question, they were able to modify it as they saw fit. More generally, the spirit of the CJ approach
involves pre-determining the process as little as possible, to encourage active control of the pro-
cess by the jurors and to avoid manipulation by the organisers or commissioning body.
The agenda was structured around four ‘op- tions’ for wetland creation in the Fens:
Option
1:
a nature reser6e A proposal, developed principally by the
Wildlife Trust, for a large 12 000 acre 4800
hectares nature reserve incorporating rare wild- fowl and mammals.
Option
2:
a Fen centre A proposal, developed by Norfolk College of
Arts and Technology and others, for a multi-use recreation and tourism centre.
Option
3:
incremental de6elopment A proposal that wetland creation should be
encouraged all over the Fens through small-scale, farmer-led initiatives, such as changed ditch man-
agement practices and the digging of ponds.
Option
4:
no deliberate action The proposal that wetland creation should not
be positively encouraged by public authorities and public money.
Each of the first three options were genuine proposals seeking public funding and the support
of various public authorities; they also repre- sented different approaches to wetland creation,
emphasising different objectives. Option 4 offered the Jury the opportunity to reject the idea of
wetland creation altogether. Options 1 to 3 would be largely funded from different sources, and did
not seek to use the same land sites. Hence Options 1 to 3 were not, as originally proposed to the
jurors, mutually exclusive and the Jury was not required to choose between them if it did not wish
to. The Jury was required, however, to show where the money to support its favoured options
would come from. The Jury was also allowed to design new options as it saw fit.
The Jury were given short presentations by, and were then able to question, a number of ‘wit-
nesses’, experts on different aspects of the ques- tion being considered. Most of the witnesses were
selected with the advice of the advisory group. They were encouraged to present their arguments
concisely, and to avoid technical language.
The Jury was regularly asked to split into three small groups — the composition of the groups
changing each time — in order to deliberate on a particular issue in detail. Except on the first day,
these small groups were not moderated by the project team. They were given a task and left to
discuss it on their own. Each group appointed a spokesperson to report back their discussion to a
plenary session of the whole Jury. The proceedings of the Jury were recorded in a
number of ways.
Summaries of small group discussions and ple- nary sessions were prepared during the Jury on
flip charts by the jurors themselves.
Written records of the plenary discussions were kept by the moderator and facilitators.
Tape recordings were made of the entire pro- ceedings, including both the small group dis-
cussions and the plenary sessions.
An evaluation questionnaire was completed by each juror individually at home after the final
day. The Jury’s conclusions and recommendations
