Citizens Juries: One Solution for Difficult Environmental Questions

This paper presents a particular method of citizen participation, the Citizens Jury1 process, as a novel way of obtaining citizen input on environmental questions. The Citizens Jury process uses random selection to impanel a group of citizens to study specific public policy issues or to review candidates in an election. The paper starts with an overview of the process, moves on to a discussion of using Citizens Juries on nuclear waste facilities and concludes with a review of how the process meets some general criteria of fairness and competency derived from the work of Jurgen Habermas.