SPECIAL ISSUE
SOCIAL PROCESSES OF ENVIRONMENTAL VALUATION
Citizens and wetlands: evaluating the Ely citizens’ jury
Jonathan Aldred
a,*, Michael Jacobs
b,1 aEmmanuel College,Cambridge, UKbThe 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.com/locate/ecolecon
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:[email protected] (J. Aldred).
1Honorary 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.
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 quesinforma-tion. 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
2An alternative test invokes standards offairnessandcom -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.
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 and/or
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
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 as a whole, as summarised below, were unani-mous. Although some jurors abstained or
regis-tered dissenting votes on some individual
conclusions (on no occasion were there more than three such abstentions or dissenting votes), all the jurors accepted the conclusions of the Jury as a whole. The next section is drawn from the Report of the Ely Jury (Aldred and Jacobs, 1997), a description of the Jury’s findings compiled by us from the above records and endorsed individually by all the jurors. However, unlike the report itself, the following summary makes no attempt to be comprehensive, aiming instead to indicate the type of deliberation that takes place in a CJ. Some effort is also made to distinguish between recom-mendations that simply represented endorsements of pre-existing proposals outlined to the Jury by their advocates, and creative recommendations developed by the Jury during its deliberations.
3. The Jury’s conclusions and recommendations
The Jury felt it important that rare species should be protected, particularly given the possi-bility of sea level rise that would damage or destroy coastal habitats. A significant majority of the jurors were impressed by the proposals to re-introduce species that had been lost from the area over centuries and to enable the habitats to develop without major human interference or management.
There was disagreement over how large the reserve should be. The Jury discussed the merits of various sizes. It was argued on the one hand that the wildlife benefits would not be significantly greater at a larger size, but on the other that, if the funding was available, the larger the area the better. The Jury supported a bid by the advocates of the nature reserve to a funding agency for £25 – 35 million over ten or more years. However, they were sceptical about whether this would in fact be enough to buy the area of land envisaged: both because the land identified was high quality agricultural land, and because once the site was identified land prices would be likely to rise. One juror specifically wanted option 1 smaller in order to leave money available for economic develment activities, given the Jury’s rejection of op-tion 2. Others argued that opop-tions 1 and 2 were not competing directly against each other, because they were seeking financial support from different UK and European government agencies. Some jurors suggested that the more ambitious the pro-ject, the more likely it was to attract funding. It was pointed out that, though large, the funding was required over a period of two or three decades, not all at once. Several jurors were wor-ried that in the process of applying for funds, the scale of the project was bound to be bargained down; it was better therefore to start on the larger size.
The Jury considered the location of the Re-serve. They were unhappy that the site identified was owned by a pension company, which meant that the proceeds of the land sale would not be retained in the Fens area. The Jury also suggested that on alternative sites, at cheaper former gravel pit locations, it might be possible to make the creation of wetland part of the mandatory restoration responsibilities of the minerals
extrac-tion company. The proposal that alternative sites be explored which addressed these points was added to option 1.
Option 2, the Fen Centre, was unanimously rejected by the Jury. They were not attracted by the ‘superficial’, ‘theme park’ character of the proposal. Jurors were sceptical about the claims made for the centre in terms of visitor numbers, and did not feel overnight visitor stays were realis-tic. Some felt that too much activity was being crammed into too small an area. Jurors argued that the centre offered few environmental benefits since it was planned to attach the centre to an existing wetland reserve rather than create a new wildlife site. The Jury felt that the centre was too small to create many jobs, and that the jobs created would not be very high quality — they would be menial and seasonal.
The Jury decided that some of the educational and recreational activities proposed in option 2 (visitor centre, camping, fishing) should be incor-porated into option 1. The Jury concluded that, although the Fen Centre might be eligible for special government funding to support job cre-ation, etc., such funds would better be used for other kinds of economic development activities.
with representation from farmers themselves. Other proposals included: planning permission for reservoirs should only be granted where wildlife benefits are included in the design; stricter control of boreholes and of irrigation practices, with abuse attracting penalties.
Option 4, no deliberate action, was unani-mously rejected.
Additional Option. An entirely new option for a local wholesale centre to distribute fruit and veg-etables produced in the Fens (titled a ‘Fens Covent garden’ after a famous market in Lon-don), was developed and supported in principle by the Jury. It was developed following consider-able discussion about the nature of agriculture in the Fens and food consumption and retailing patterns in society generally. Jurors were dis-turbed at the distances travelled by Fen produce and felt that more of the added value in distribu-tion should be retained in the Fens area. They thought the job creation and economic develop-ment potential of a wholesale centre would be significant. However, some jurors expressed fears that it would become monopolised by the larger firms; they argued that care had to be taken in its design and management. The Jury recommended that local produce should be branded and marketed as such (for example as ‘Fen food’) and distributed from a local wholesale centre.
4. The Ely Jury methodology
The development of CJ methodology so far has been largely driven by research institutes which have concentrated on the role of CJs as decision-recommending bodies. This has strongly influ-enced the design of the process. Unlike most previous juries, the aim in conducting the Ely CJ was not solely to reach a decision on the matter in hand. There was no commissioning authority that sought to employ the Jury as a decision-aiding technique; this gave us more freedom in designing the process, although it introduced several poten-tial problems not faced by previous juries, such as the difficulty of making the jurors take the process seriously. The Ely Jury departs from previous
practice, notably in its interpretation of a ‘repre-sentative’ Jury sample, and in stressing the
social process as much as the decision
reached. Although many institutions involved in developing CJs wish quickly to establish an agreed ‘best practice’ methodology for CJs, it is important to emphasise that this has not yet been developed. While aiming to contribute to this process of development, we are doubtful about the virtue of establishing a methodological ‘tem-plate’ for CJs, not least because an agreed — and
hence unquestioned — CJ process is more
prone to progressive capture by commissioning bodies.
The design and execution of the Ely Jury was in general considered very successful. The atmo-sphere in the meeting room over the 4 days was
appropriately relaxed, with much laughter
and all jurors appearing at ease to speak. All jurors were given an evaluation form on the final day; the comments on the forms returned (14 out of 16) were generally very positive. Most of the
significant criticisms raised had already
been recognised and acknowledged by the re-searchers.
4.1. Researcher in6ol6ement
In an attempt to avoid influencing the Jury, the researchers agreed not to participate in the pro-cess, for example, via making comments or asking questions of the witnesses. This proved harder than anticipated. It rapidly became clear that the role of the moderator and facilitators needed much more thought in this respect. During breaks, the researchers, in attempting to put the jurors at ease with them, went ‘off duty’ and began to participate in the discussions. It might be
thought obvious that the moderator/facilitators
should not repeat only part of the information
that has already been provided to a Jury, but what if the intervention is merely to clarify dis-putes between jurors who cannot remember what
a witness said? Similarly, should the moderator/
should the researchers always provide it, espe-cially where this provision will be particularly affected by the researchers’ interpretive filter? Two interpretations of the situation appear possible.
On one interpretation, the problems of re-searcher involvement just outlined reveal an en-demic difficulty with deliberative methods. It is not possible to construe the valuation process within a deliberative institution in a neutral way. At best, rules need to be determined that pro-scribe the permitted forms of researcher involve-ment. This difficulty with deliberative methods is contrasted with the supposedly ‘neutral’ stance claimed by researchers conducting contingent val-uation (CVM) exercises (neutrality is implicitly claimed by, for example, Mitchell and Carson, 1989).
An alternative interpretation maintains that re-searchers are inextricably interlinked with the val-uation process; however, after a good CJ, jurors should judge that researcher interventions did not manipulate the process. But in the early stages of a CJ, the Ely Jury experience suggests that sub-stantial participation by moderators is often es-sential. The main purpose of the first sessions was to make the jurors comfortable with one another and their surroundings and let them become ac-customed to deliberating. In the first sessions, many Ely jurors seemed ready to judge themselves to have ‘failed to make progress in answering the question’. Instead the presence of a moderator legitimated discussion which would otherwise have been regarded as ‘pointless’. More generally, it is unclear whether absence of moderation re-duces the effectiveness of deliberation among members of a group. Absence of moderation may have significant costs as well as benefits. Regard-ing the claimed neutrality achievable by CVM researchers, they have long argued over the extent to which CVM results are dependent on the infor-mation provided — itself a judgement of the survey designers — but the debate is interesting because of the extent of disagreement about whether this dependency is a ‘problem’ for CVM. This parallels disagreement about whether re-searcher involvement is a ‘problem’ for CJ methodology.
4.2. Pro6ision of written information
Central to the Habermasian method for deliber-ative institutions is that all individuals must have equal access to relevant information concerning the question at hand, and equal opportunity to assess the authenticity and sincerity of claims made by others (Armour, 1996). It is generally accepted that both these requirements are more likely to be satisfied if most information is pre-sented verbally by witnesses rather than in written form. In the Ely Jury, we expected that jurors would be intimidated by large quantities of writ-ten material and would be unlikely to read it. Moreover, some jurors’ facility with written mate-rial was anticipated to be greater than others, so written material could not be used to provide background information at the beginning of the Jury since some jurors would not absorb it. Thus a briefwritten summary of each option was given
to each juror after that option had been verbally
presented to them.
Although our fears seemed warranted for a very few jurors, for many others the absence of prior information often seemed to undermine their ability to question witnesses as closely as they would have liked. Several jurors observed in the post-jury focus group that they used the ques-tion and answer sessions to obtain addiques-tional information that they believed should already have been made available to them. Regarding the total quantity of information, both written and verbal, some jurors appeared over time to lose their determination to reach consensus, partly be-cause of a feeling that ‘no more progress can be made in resolving arguments without more information’.
in-structed accordingly. Several jurors reported on the evaluation forms and in the focus group that alternative spending possibilities should have been outlined explicitly. This suggests that jurors find it difficult to consider relatively abstract notions such as ‘spend resources elsewhere’.
Written information is usually less approach-able in this sense than information from a well-motivated speaker. Notwithstanding the jurors’ comments that they would have liked more writ-ten information (e.g. to outline alternative spend-ing possibilities), they appeared to ignore much of what was provided, and there was some evidence of a few jurors concluding from the information provided that they were incapable of forming judgements about it and instead withdrawing from debate. Notably in the focus group, when asked how they would have reacted to an entirely written presentation of option 1, the jurors (in-cluding those who had been most insistent on more written information) imagined they would have reacted ‘What’s going on here then?…Forty million quid, you’ve got to be joking…Spend the money on a hospital.’ As it was, the jurors made clear in the focus groups that option 1 was fa-voured because of its broad concept and mode of presentation, both of which captured the jurors’ imagination, rather than its precise details. The experience of the Ely Jury suggests that no level and type of information provision can entirely avoid the tension between equality of access to deliberation and ensuring jurors can deliberate competently.
5. Representativeness
One strand running throughout most critiques of the CJ approach is its lack of representative-ness. A CJ is perceived to offer the opinion of only 16 people compared to the legitimacy gained by CVM with its broader base of respondents. This argument relies on twin claims which are implicit in much CVM literature: (i) there is a ‘correct’ decision or a ‘true’ valuation; and (ii) a more statistically representative sample comes closer to finding it (Sagoff, 1998). But how repre-sentative is the CVM alternative to CJs? Does it
in some sense come closer to representing the views of people? The problem is that people are often unable to represent their views through a CV. They can express certain sorts of preferences, but not many of those preferences or judgements that characterise environmental concern (O’Neill, 1993; Aldred, 1996; Holland, 1997; Jacobs, 1997). Equally, they need an institutional context that permits them to form and shape their preferences. CVM does not offer this. Once the point that individuals will not bring to the decision process a priori preferences has been accepted, then the ‘market analogy’ motivating CVM breaks down (Sen, 1995a). CVM is seen not to mimic the workings of a market where agents hold prefer-ences a priori.4
5.1. Stakeholders
A notable feature of the Ely CJ was that it attempted explicitly to exclude from the Jury those with a private interest in the decision. In-stead of bringing stakeholders with conflicting interests directly into a CJ, they were involved in the advisory group that met with the objective of drawing up the Jury’s agenda. Thus they had an opportunity to agree on the questions to be ad-dressed by the CJ, without necessarily having to agree on the answers. This goes some way to-wards addressing a widely perceived problem of the deliberative approach — that deliberative in-stitutions face a trade-off between representing the interests of all relevant stakeholders, and rec-onciling these conflicting interests. Either the in-stitution will be unrepresentative, or it will face an impossibility in resolving these entrenched confl-icts. Even supporters of a deliberative approach to environmental decision-making acknowledge this problem:
Where the issue to be addressed by a values Jury involves such difficult value conflicts (a proposal to build a ski area on a mountain of religious significance to American Indians), members of the public are likely to quarrel with Jury membership, complaining that their partic-ular interest is poorly represented. One may argue that Jury membership needs to be repre-sentative…However, once Jury members are se-lected on the basis of the group they represent, the Jury runs the risk of becoming a negotia-tion session among opposing points of view rather than a Jury (Brown et al., 1995: 129).
In the Ely CJ, the aim was to ensure that collecti6ely, the jurors gave voice to all relevant interests and perspectives, rather than treating each juror indi6idually as the representative of a particular interest or group. This objective shaped the Jury selection process.
5.2. Jurors
In designing the Ely CJ, the requirement that a Jury be ‘representative’ of a defined community was interpreted in a particular way. No juror was selected as the representative of a group or inter-est. However, the alternative approach of many CJ practitioners, based on achieving a representa-tive sample of the local population, was also rejected. While most practitioners acknowledge that a Jury of 16 cannot attain ‘true’ statistical representativeness, they suggest some limited form of statistically based representativeness is achiev-able. For example, Crosby’s favourite metaphor describes the Jury as ‘a microcosm of the public’ (Crosby, 1996; Crosby, in press), suggesting the jurors mimic the demographic and other patterns of the public as a whole. On this approach, a profile of the relevant geographic area according to gender, age, ethnic background and other stan-dard criteria is built by drawing on demographic data, and the Jury is then recruited to match these criteria as closely as possible. The design of the Ely CJ rejected this approach, for two reasons. Firstly, the benefits of statistically based recruiting are dubious for such a small sample. More
impor-tantly, wedid believe it important to try to have
all interests fairly voiced, understanding interests to be argumentative perspectives rather than group opinions.
Rather than statistical representativeness, the underlying approach was to try to anticipate the particular private perspectives that might strongly influence jurors’ behaviour, and ensure these were all adequately, but not excessively, represented through the Jury. Thus representativeness is inter-preted in the CJ context as ‘fair representation of all relevant perspectives’, where: (i) the set of perspectives is unique to each CJ, and carefully chosen; and (ii) ‘relevant’ perspectives are those expected to influence juror behaviour. Both (i) and (ii) inevitably involve judgements made by the organisers, but informed by the views of stake-holders and the particular institutional context. In Ely, this approach led to the rejection of com-monly used selection criteria such as ethnic back-ground and housing tenure in favour of the criteria that were expected most to affect the outcome of the Jury, such as length of time resident in the area, residential district and agri-cultural employment. Defining perspectives and weighting a profile according to more sophisti-cated quantitative techniques such as attitude scales would still be too coarse for local condi-tions, in addition to the inherent problems with attitude scales.
The criteria are detailed in Table 1. The first column corresponds to a notional Jury size of 20; this was the number initially recruited in order to ensure that around 16 would in practice attend. The second column corresponds to the 16 actual Jury members who did attend.
irresolv-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 AB Min 4 3
Min 4
C1 5
C2 Min 4 4
DE Min 4 4
1–2
Employment Farmers (manager/owner) 2
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: Larger settlements in Fens 2
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-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 deciimpres-sions, 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
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 andshift
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 economy/environment
dis-tinction as a simplifying heuristic to interpret information presented to them. A further
ten-dency among jurors to focus on local and/or 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
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 thisas 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 6Orthodox 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.
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 (stakeholders/decision-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
hand, it is arguable that since the jurors could
have chosen to support the Fen centre as well as
options 1 and 3 — yet did not — the Jury was indeed actively choosing.
Confusion about the role of CJs looks certain to persist, and has at least two dimensions. A CJ may be perceived as substantive deliberation on the issue at hand, a sophisticated form of market research, or ‘notional’ deliberation for the proce-dural purpose of enhancing citizen participation with relatively little concern for its content. The first two cases admit, but do not determine, the two roles just noted — CJs as forums for value articulation or techniques for decision recom-mending. Between them, the stakeholders, jurors, researchers and witnesses brought all these per-ceptions of its role to the CJ process. For exam-ple, one outcome that surprised us as researchers was the ex post enthusiasm for the CJ process among stakeholders whose proposals had been comprehensively rejected by the Jury. But these stakeholders regarded the CJ primarily as an ad-vertising exercise rather than a process of value articulation, let alone a technique for decision recommending.
In organising the Ely Jury, our attempt to leave the Jury’s role an open question led to methodo-logical difficulties as we sought to satisfy multiple objectives for the process. A clear, and in retro-spect unsurprising, conclusion of the study is that the methodology and design of a CJ is strongly dependent on its purpose: decision-reaching, deci-sion-aiding via analysis of the deliberation, or encouraging political participation per se. A sup-plementary result is that attempts to satisfy multi-ple objectives in one CJ will raise methodological tensions throughout the process.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Robin Grove-White, Alan Holland, John O’Neill and Clive Spash for their involvement in organising the Ely Jury, and their substantial input into discussions on CJs and related issues, and also to Celia Rutherford, De-partment of Land Economy, University of Cam-bridge, for valuable help in facilitating the Jury.
The work was undertaken with the financial sup-port of the DG-XII of the European Commission under contract ENV4-CT96-0226 for the project ‘Social Processes for Environmental Valuation: Procedures and Institutions for Social Valuations of Natural Capitals in Environmental Conserva-tion and Sustainability Policy’ (The VALSE Pro-ject). We would like particularly to thank the Ely jurors themselves, and the members of the advi-sory group of interested parties. Without the in-volvement of all these parties, the Jury would not have been possible.
References
Aldred, J., 1996. Value conflicts in environmental decision-making. Ph.D., Faculty of Economics and Politics. Univer-sity of Cambridge, Cambridge UK.
Aldred, J., Jacobs M., 1997. Citizens and Wetlands: Report of the Ely Citizens’ Jury. Centre for the Study of Environ-mental Change, Lancaster University.
Armour, A., 1996. The citizens’ jury model of public participa-tion. In: Renn, O., Webler, T., Wiedemann, P. (Eds.), Fairness and Competence in Citizen Participation: Evalu-ating Models for Environmental Discourse. Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Bohman, J., 1996. Public Deliberation. MIT, Cambridge. Bohman, J., 1998. The coming of age of deliberative
democ-racy. Journal of Political Philosophy 6, 400 – 25.
Bohman, J., Rehg, W., 1997. Deliberative Democracy. MIT, Cambridge.
Brown, T., Peterson, G., Tonn, B., 1995. The values jury to aid natural resource decisions. Land Econ. 71, 250 – 260. Cohen, J., 1989. Deliberation and democratic legitimacy. In:
Hamlin, A., Pettit, P. (Eds.), The Good Polity. Blackwell, Oxford.
Coote, A., Lenaghan, J., 1997. Citizens’ Juries. Institute of Public Policy Research, London.
Crosby, N., 1996. Citizens’ juries: one solution for difficult environmental questions. In: Renn, O., Webler, T., Wiede-mann, P. (Eds.), Fairness and Competence in Citizen Par-ticipation: Evaluating Models for Environmental Discourse. Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Crosby, N., 1999. The citizens jury process and environmental decisions. In: Sexton K., Burkhardt, T., Marcus, A., Easter, K. (Eds.), Better Environmental Decisions: Strate-gies for Governments, Businesses and Communities. Island Press, Washington (in press).
Dahl, R., 1982. Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy. Yale UP, New Haven.
Dryzek, J., 1990. Discursive Democracy. CUP, Cambridge. Elster, J., 1986. The market and the forum: three varieties of
Elster, J., 1998. Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge, CUP. Estlund, D., 1997. Beyond fairness and deliberation. In:
Bohman, J., Rehg, W. (Eds.), Deliberative Democracy. MIT, Cambridge.
Estlund, D.M., 1993. Who’s afraid of deliberative democracy — on the strategic deliberative dichotomy in recent consti-tutional jurisprudence. Tex. Law Rev. 71, 1437 – 1477. Fishkin, J., 1991. Democracy and Deliberation: New
Direc-tions for Democratic Reform. Yale UP, New Haven. Gunderson, A., 1995. The Environmental Promise of
Demo-cratic Deliberation. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
Habermas, J., 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Holland, A., 1997. The foundations of environmental decision-making. Int. J. Environ. Pollut. 7, 484 – 496.
Jacobs, M., 1997. Environmental valuation, deliberative democracy and public decision-making institutions. In: Foster, J. (Ed.), Valuing Nature? Routledge, London. Kant, I., 1987. Critique of Judgement. Hackett, Indianapolis. Kuper, R., 1997. Deliberating waste: the Hertfordshire
citi-zens’ jury. Local Environ. 2, 139 – 153.
Miller, D., 1992. Deliberative democracy and social choice. Polit. Stud. 40, 54 – 67.
Mitchell, R.C., Carson, R., 1989. Using Surveys to Value Public Goods: the Contingent Valuation Method. Re-sources for the Future, Washington.
O’Hara, S., 1996. Discursive ethics in ecosystems valuation and environmental policy. Ecol. Econ. 16, 95 – 107. O’Neill, J., 1993. Ecology, Policy and Politics. Routledge,
London.
Rawls, J., 1971. A Theory of Justice. Clarendon, Oxford. Renn, O., T. Webler, and P. Wiedemann. 1995a. ‘Fairness and
Competence in Citizen Participation: Evaluating Models for Environmental Discourse,’ Dordrecht: Kluwer. Renn, O., Webler, T., Wiedemann, P., 1995b. Novel
Ap-proaches to Public Participation in Environmental Deci-sion-making. Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Rippe, K., Schaber, P., 1999. Democracy and Environmental Decision-Making. Environ. Values 8, 75 – 88.
Sagoff, M., 1998. Aggregation and deliberation in valuing environmental public goods: a look beyond contingent pricing. Ecol. Econ. 24, 213 – 230.
Schmitt, C., 1985. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. MIT Press, Cambridge.
Sen, A., 1993. Internal consistency of choice. Econometrica 61, 495 – 521.
Sen, A., 1995a. Environmental evaluation and social choice: contingent valuation and the market analogy. Jpn. Econ. Rev. 46, 23 – 37.
Sen, A., 1995b. Is the idea of purely internal consistency of choice bizarre? In: Altham, J., Harrison, R. (Eds.), World, Mind and Ethics. CUP, Cambridge.
Smith, G., Wales, C., 1999. The theory and practice of citi-zens’ juries. Policy Politic 27, 295 – 308.
