This article illuminates the contribution of stakeholder dialogues to environmental policy making. It makes a distinction between stakeholder dialogues as consensus building and stakeholder dialogues as deliberation. Although consensus building seems to be the dominant approach in participatory environmental policy making, this article questions the merits of consensus building and it uses the experience of the Dutch stakeholder dialogue project Climate OptiOns for the Long term (COOL) to explore, in a deliberative design, the shortcomings of a consensus-building approach and how they are possibly dealt with. The article presents the results of two deliberative methods that have been used in the COOL project -the repertory grid analysis and the dialectical approach -to demonstrate how a deliberative design can help policy makers to critically assess arguments in favor of and against a broad range of policy options, and deal with stakeholder conflict in an early phase of the policy process.
Citizens' juries are a form of ''minipublics,'' small-scale experiments with citizen participation in public decision-making. The article presents a theoretical argument that improves understanding relating to the design of the citizens' jury. We develop the claim that two discourses on democracy can be discerned: the deliberative and the pluralist. By looking at the design features of citizens' juries we conclude that they are based on pluralist reasoning to a far greater extent than most authors seem to realize, and that the association with deliberative democracy is therefore one-sided. Based on empirical findings, we attempt to shed further light on the actual operation of citizens' juries. Observations of two recent Dutch juries suggest on the one hand that a learning process and a positive effect on the sense of political involvement occurred. On the other hand, we saw a certain level of groupthink in one of the citizens' juries, and found that the juries are not greatly representative in terms of political preferences. Our findings point firstly to a need for greater awareness among the organizers of juries of the two democratic discourses. This would lead to more consistent jury design. Secondly, our research emphasizes the need for more hands-on critical research of minipublics.The functioning of the public sphere in Western representative democracies has been a longstanding topic of study for political scientists and scholars of science and technology alike. Oft-mentioned concerns by researchers in this area include the alienation between elected representatives and the electorate, the effect of media and private companies on public opinion and institutions, cultural and other cleavages among groups that make engagement problematic, the demise of associations, and the ever increasing levels of market and technocratic thinking.
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