Citizens' jury

A Citizens' Jury is a mechanism of participatory action research (PAR) that draws on the symbolism, and some of the practices, of a legal trial by jury. It generally includes three main elements:

The term "citizens' jury" was coined in the late 1980s by the Jefferson Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They had developed the process in 1974 as a "citizens' committee", but decided to create and trademark the new name in order to protect the process from commercialization. The practice of citizens' juries has thus been tightly regulated in the US. Virtually the same process was created in Germany in the early 1970s; American inventor Ned Crosby and German inventor Peter Dienel did not learn of each other's work until 1985. In Britain, the process spread rapidly because of a publication by IPPR in 1994. Outside the US and Germany, citizens' juries have been conducted in many different ways, with many different objectives, and with varying degrees of success.