Planning cells and citizen juries in environmental policy: Deliberation and its limits

This chapter considers whether citizen juries are likely to encourage better environmental policy decisions. The chief argument presented here is that they achieve a type of deliberation over policy options which is valuable because it forces engagement between the views, values and information of ordinary citizen with those of policy experts or other 'insiders'. However, more ambitious claims for citizen juries must be balanced against their apparent institutional fragility, and related weaknesses. Consideration of the background of the citizen jury idea is briefly given here, followed by discussion of some comparative experiences with citizen juries. This is followed by a more in-depth and critical evaluation of a trial citizen jury on waste policy held in Ireland, which the author administered.