Valuing Our Natural Environment Final Report ... - HM Treasury

Valuing Our Natural Environment – Final Report - Annex1
and local, the jurors may be selected as key stakeholders / representatives of different
points of view, rather than randomly.
A1.2.3.10 Key uses – coverage of natural environment
The citizens’ jury process can be applied to any resources, but as noted, they are
particularly suitable where there are fundamental issues at stake. For example,
applications to nuclear waste storage, GM crops, nanotechnology, as well as wind farm
siting, fisheries policy, national park creation, managed realignment and so on. A recent
example in a UK context is provided by the UK CEED Consensus Conference on Radioactive
Waste 2 .
A1.2.3.11 Discussion
Citizen’s Juries differ from other group consultation methods in being very time- and
resource-intensive but allowing for informed public opinion to be explored in a very high
level of depth and detail. A wide range of information is incorporated, under control of the
jurors, and there is time for this information to be considered, discussed, checked and so
on. Thus the extent to which the views expressed can be thought of as well-informed and
carefully considered is greater than for less intensive group techniques and some surveybased
methods.
A1.2.3.12 Consideration of distributional impacts
Within the citizens’ juries process there is clear bias towards the more vocal and/or better
informed participants (note that these may not necessarily be the same people). As
Lenaghan et al. (1996) note some jurors will be more articulate, confident, and
experienced and better educated, and will tend to dominate the discussions when all the
jurors were present. As a way around this, they suggest splitting the jury into two smaller
groups. In practice the CJ will involve plenary sessions, working groups etc., which involve
bringing different people to work and discuss together.
Aside from this, there is no obvious systematic bias in the citizens’ jury process, provided
the group is randomly selected. However there is likely to be random bias within any
group, since the selection cannot be representative due to the small size of the group.
There may also be bias introduced because of the time commitment required: ‘busy’
people may find it hard to take part, so there may be bias towards those with more “spare
time” (the retired, unemployed, possibly students, etc), those with fewer family
commitments, or lower-paid people for whom the compensation payments give a strong
incentive to participate.
Like other non-economic techniques, expressions of value are not made through willingness
to pay, and so there is no distributional/equity issue with value being constrained by ability
to pay.
A1.2.3.13 Advantages and disadvantages
Due to the opportunity for informed deliberation, citizens’ juries may provide a better
approach to tackling complex questions and difficult choices than other discursive methods
(Coote and Lenaghan, 1997; Kenyon, 2001). However, the main disadvantage of the
approach lies in that it is not necessarily representative and potential problems can be
envisaged where decision-makers go against citizens’ juries’ verdicts. Other possible
disadvantages include:
• raising expectations that agency will do what jury suggests;
• timescale – tend to be one-off;
• sometimes no consensus is reached, so the jury does not necessarily reach a unanimous
verdict, but can highlight areas of concern/disagreement;
• the need to be careful that the expert/lay divide does not mean that the jury just
regurgitates what it is told;
2 http://www.ukceed.org/consensus_conference/contents.htm
eftec A40
December 2006