Deliberative Processes
Deliberative processes, like community juries or citizens’ juries, are used all over the world. They bring together a diverse group of people who broadly represent the entire community. In the case of a citizens’ jury, these people are randomly selected from the population. The people who attend learn about issues, discuss them with one another, and then make recommendations about what should happen and how things should change. The group’s conclusions are reported to people and organizations that can make decisions about the topic, and publicised to the wider community.
There are many types of deliberative processes, and their names are not used consistently in the deliberative methodological literature. All deliberative processes have some features in common, including setting a focused question for the group to answer, providing high quality information, and creating an environment that supports all participants to learn, be respected, be heard, and contribute to group decision making. Generally below, when we refer to a community jury we mean to a deliberative process where participants were purposively sampled, and when we refer to a citizens’ jury we mean a process where participants were recruited via a democratic lottery (that is, by random invitation followed by stratified selection).