Ecological Economics 34 2000 217 – 232
SPECIAL ISSUE SOCIAL PROCESSES OF ENVIRONMENTAL VALUATION
Citizens and wetlands: evaluating the Ely citizens’ jury
Jonathan Aldred
a,
, Michael Jacobs
b,1
a
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, UK
b
The Fabian Society,
11
Dartmouth Street, London, UK
Abstract
A citizens’ jury CJ is a method to aid decision-making by public bodies, and is loosely based on the idea of a criminal jury. Ordinary members of the public, acting in their capacity as citizens concerned with the public good
rather than consumers concerned with private interest, are drawn together to reach a public decision. The jury is independent, and its verdict is expected to carry some authority, derived from an understanding that the jury is
representative, and the deliberation is satisfactory. A CJ was organised as part of a larger UK study which also conducted a contingent valuation survey on broadly the same valuation issue, land use in a former wetland region in
Cambridgeshire, UK. A major aim of the study was to investigate whether CJs allow views of a different kind to those captured by contingent valuation surveys to be expressed — views couched in terms of public benefits, right
and wrong, and the common good. If this is true, CJs offer a promising forum for articulating views, and even recommending decisions, about public goods including environment features. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights
reserved.
Keywords
:
Citizens’ juries; Deliberation; Contingent valuation; Public goods www.elsevier.comlocateecolecon
1. Introduction
A citizens’ jury CJ involves around 16 ordi- nary members of the public, selected to represent
a cross-section of a defined community. The jury meets over a period of usually 4 days to consider
an important public policy question. The mem- bers of the jury are briefed by expert witnesses,
and discuss the issues with each other in small and large groups, chaired by an independent modera-
Corresponding author. Tel.: + 44-1223-762329; fax: + 44- 1223-334426.
E-mail address
:
jsa1001cam.ac.uk J. Aldred.
1
Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for the Study of Envi- ronmental Change, University of Lancaster, UK; Associate
Research Fellow, Department of Geography, London School of Economics, UK; General Secretary, Fabian Society, UK.
0921-800900 - see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 9 2 1 - 8 0 0 9 0 0 0 0 1 5 9 - 2
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
