Deliberative democracy and environmental justice: evaluating the role of citizens’ juries in urban climate governance

ABSTRACT

Understanding mechanisms of policy engagement and the participation of different actors in urban climate governance is particularly important as cities follow climate emergency declarations with corresponding action, to ensure that inequalities are not exacerbated by climate action. Citizens’ juries are a deliberative democracy tool that allows a demographically representative sample of the population to learn about a contested issue from experts, and discuss, debate and develop policy recommendations. Leeds City Council declared a climate emergency in March 2019, compelling the local authority to take serious measures to implement a reduction in carbon emissions to net zero by 2030. A citizens’ jury was established by an independent local body, the Leeds Climate Commission, to debate various possible courses of action in response to the declaration. This research critically examined the processes surrounding and embedded in the Leeds citizens’ climate jury with a focus on procedural justice and representation justice. Emerging lessons include that recognition of power differentials between various social groups should be carefully considered throughout deliberative processes to ensure representation justice is achieved in decision making. Representation justice demands that those who are included in decision making spaces are able to harness their position to voice their experiences, opinions, hopes and concerns in deciding which trade-offs will be made. In citizens’ juries, facilitation style and techniques play a critical role in achieving this participatory parity, alongside other factors. There is potential for important procedural co-benefits to emerge, such as trust-building, place identity and hope for the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Just transitions
• citizens’ juries
• deliberative democracy
• climate emergency
• climate governance
• public participation

Introduction

Urban responses to climate emergency

Declaration of climate emergency is a formal political response to the challenge of keeping global warming to below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels involving “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018). Climate emergency is a clarion call for rapid decarbonisation of energy, food and transport systems to net zero by 2030 (Davidson et al. 2020) alongside deeper societal reflection upon the injustices generated by extreme weather events, heat stress, drought, biodiversity loss, and sea level rise (Roberts and Parks 2008; Magrath 2010; Grineski et al. 2012) that fall disproportionately upon those social groups already suffering from existing political and economic marginalisation, including citizens within low-income developing economies, indigenous communities, people of colour, migrants and victims of state violence (Mantyka-Pringle et al. 2015; Byravan and Rajan 2017; Clark and Bettini 2017; Whyte 2020). Climate emergency is a political signal for urgent and deep governance reform. Understanding the mechanisms of multi-agent policy engagement in urban climate governance is vitally important in a climate emergency context, so that the interests of social and political equality are maintained during periods of rapid political change.

Climate emergency highlights the failure of both national political leadership, and international negotiation in achieving progress (UNFCCC 2019). Much media attention political focus and academic research have centred the role of the nation state and the difficulties involved in negotiating climate change agreements at the global scale (Bulkeley, Edwards, and Fuller 2014, 32), yet it is at smaller scales of governance that much of the action on climate change mitigation and adaptation is taking place (Chatterton, Featherstone, and Routledge 2013; Thew, Middlemiss, and Paavola 2020). Although social pressure to declare climate emergency was primarily directed at state governments; devolved administrations, regional and local authorities have greater flexibility and speed (Davidson et al. 2020), thus becoming “first responders” to climate emergency (Rosenzweig et al. 2010).

A polycentric governance model, in which urban climate change decision-making is both semi-autonomous from state-led initiatives, and where policy initiatives can move “upwards” through policy networks from city-to-national-to-international scales through processes of policy learning is of growing importance (Bulkeley, Broto, and Edwards 2012; Bulkeley, Edwards, and Fuller 2014; Gillard et al. 2017) Moreover, cities have become sites of innovation in low carbon transition, sustainability policy, technology implementation and social engagement practice; driving new projects and systems for energy production and consumption, food and transport (Chatterton et al., 2018).

Urban/peri-urban low carbon transition governance raises interrelated environmental, energy and climate justice challenges, and hence the just transition planning in which historically fossil-fuel dependent communities are protected through social interventions to secure workers’ rights and livelihoods during low-carbon transition. Just transition counters a securitisation narrative in which the urgency of climate action enables authorities to curtail individual rights/freedoms through “streamlining” low-carbon infrastructure construction (McCauley and Heffron 2018). Just transition implies stronger understanding of diverse social groups’ ability to achieve participatory parity (i.e. full partnership in social interaction) (Fraser 1997; Thew, Middlemiss, and Paavola 2020), and scalar parity through which civil society groups and political authorities can meet and engage on shared issues and on equal terms (Cotton 2014). Such parity ensures equity and egalitarianism in climate change response (Walker and Bulkeley 2006).

Just transition under conditions of rapid change and large-scale low carbon infrastructure investment (Bailey et al. 2020) necessitates the evaluation of political power and agency across regions, social, political and infrastructure networks. Investment and development necessarily involve value trade-offs, even amongst the most justice-oriented decarbonisation plans of the Green New Deal (Powell, Krebel, and Lerven 2019). Societal engagement with low-carbon and other forms of infrastructure decision-making is often inaccessible to certain social groups (including migrants and other non-voting residents) (Natarajan et al. 2019); and new infrastructures, taxes and changes to social practices impact diverse groups in different ways (Bulkeley, Edwards, and Fuller 2014; Wang 2016). It is necessary therefore for urban authorities to develop new forms of engagement practice to counter such exclusion.

Deliberative climate governance

There is growing political recognition of a “democratic deficit” in climate, energy and infrastructure development policy, and so central government-led initiatives are now increasingly cognisant of the need for “engagement” – acknowledging sociological, demographic, geographic and economic differences between affected communities (Davis, Mitchell, and Prikken 2014; Open Government Partnership 2021). Emphasis upon engagement is, however, constrained by the capacity and opportunities presented for stakeholders given their often limited financial resources (e.g. Simon, Diprose, and Thomas 2019) as well as the time and effort required to develop trust-based interactions with more vulnerable communities (Hansson 2018).

Deliberative decision-making has long been of interest to environmental management scholars due to its attested ability to consider the scope, scale and complexity of environmental issues (Smith 2003, 80–81). According to a report by the UK Centre For Climate Change And Social Transformations (CAST), democratic engagement through direct citizen participation in governance outcomes has potential “to improve the quality, legitimacy, and feasibility of policy outcomes” (Capstick et al. 2020, 1) for decarbonisation pathways.

Deliberative climate governance is a form of direct democracy – whereby decision-making quality is defined through the capacity to establish communicative rationality in which evidence and fair argumentation dominate discourse (Habermas 1984); and to provide opportunity for direct citizen involvement in policy-making, rather than through representative/aggregative voting mechanisms. The “fairness” of argumentation within deliberative procedures is (ideally) achieved through fair and proportional representation of diverse social groups and identities, as well as through proportionally-weighted power given to those perspectives via careful demographic representation. Thus deliberation is through a “mini-public” model of participatory design.

Deliberative decision-making mechanisms through mini-publics are lauded for their capacity for providing “bottom-up”, place-based mitigation and adaptation responses that are sensitive to local needs, heterogenous communities of actors and diverse value positions (Ostfeld and Reiner 2020). They aim to ensure fair procedural outcomes and help to build capacity within local climate governance institutions. However, the participatory tools that are used to build deliberative capacity amongst local stakeholders – such as workshops, consensus conferences and citizens juries – remain subject to “framing effects” (Romsdahl 2020) that shape both process and outcomes, influencing the viewpoints that are admitted into deliberative procedures, the alternatives that are defined, and ultimately the solutions that are proposed (Blue and Dale 2016). For example, deliberation amongst “mini-public” experiments using participatory methods, will tend to frame the problem as one involving expert reasoning and thus close down other forms of deliberative engagement with the issue (Blue 2015), such as community-based agenda setting and inclusion (Romsdahl 2020).

The Citizens’ Jury model

In this critical policy evaluation, we focus upon the Citizens’ Jury as an emergent tool of deliberative urban/peri-urban climate governance. Our place-based evaluation employs qualitative analysis of the Leeds Citizens’ Climate Jury (hereafter LCCJ) – an exemplar model of deliberative democratic engagement in regional-scale climate change planning. We then make recommendations to urban authorities in applying this model to improve procedural justice in transition planning. Citizens’ juries are one of a range of deliberative tools employed for local democratic engagement with environmental policy. Example of other tools that have been used by local authorities to achieve deeper citizen engagement include public meetings, stakeholder forums/advisory groups, community workshops and tailored events (Simon, Diprose, and Thomas 2019) and games, scenarios and community dialogue (Shi et al. 2016).

The LCCJ is participatory-deliberative tool that is similar in design and approach to the citizens’ assembly or citizens’ forum (Smith 2003; Fishkin and Luskin 2006), including the UK’s national Climate Assembly (Climate Assembly UK 2020)– it takes a random, stratified sample of citizens to create a demographic microcosm or “mini-public” albeit on a local/regional rather than national scale. The jury is given information on a key topic via presentations by, and discussions with, experts on a topic, with time to discuss and debate the issues and develop recommended actions (Bryant and Hall 2017). Citizens’ juries offer representative participation and informed discussion leading to richly qualitative recommendations as an input to formal decision-making (Bryant and Hall 2017). Citizens’ juries are thus “top-down”/institution-led participatory tools, though they are situated in the context of a broader societal response to climate emergency, in which informal “bottom-up” or “uninvited” stakeholder engagement occurs through direct action, protest campaigns, social media engagement, volunteering, community development and political lobbying (Chilvers et al. 2018).

Citizens’ juries are currently enjoying resurgent popularity worldwide (Ostfeld and Reiner 2020), in response to increasing acknowledgement that the interconnected socio-technical issues surrounding low-carbon energy system transition require the meaningful engagement of wider society (Chilvers et al. 2018). A significant body of literature focusses on the unequal distribution of environmental burdens across time, place, society and scale, including exploring causes and effects of this phenomenon (e.g. Shrader-Frechette 2002; Fairburn, Butler, and Smith 2009; Cotton 2014; Mitchell, Norman, and Mullin 2015). Climate justice literature also includes an exploration of how inequality arises, persists and may be addressed through policymaking, research, development strategy and governance of the energy transition (e.g. Walker and Bulkeley 2006; Sareen and Haarstad 2018; McCauley and Heffron 2018; Delina and Sovacool 2018; Sovacool and Brisbois 2019).

Socio-economic inequality, conflicting societal messages about climate crisis, and a breakdown in trust between technocratic authorities (e.g. developer, planning and regulatory bodies) and heterogeneous publics (Powell et al. 2019) are all key challenges for the just transition (Bell 2020). The breakdown of institutional trust is felt keenly in post-industrial regions. Leeds is a key example. West Yorkshire is a place that has undertaken rapid rural/peri-urban transition from traditional fossil fuel industries (i.e. coal-mining) (Powell et al. 2019), whilst being potentially subjected to new forms of extractivism (i.e. until recently shale gas fracking), and broader low-carbon infrastructure development as a means to meet regeneration and economic rebalancing policy goals (i.e. the HS2 high speed rail network). The UK’s nationally significant infrastructure planning model operates principally through interaction between private developers and planning authorities, within only nominal public engagement, and thus excludes a diverse array of voices and values in decision-making (Cotton 2014; Patterson et al. 2018; Natarajan et al. 2019). The broader loss of trust that this entails stimulates social movements of opposition and place-protective action – as has been shown in the rise of emergent anti-fracking, anti-HS2, and anti-wind farm groups (Crompton 2015; Phillips 2017; Whitton et al. 2018). Given the high stakes of climate crisis and scale of the response measures required (Leeds City Council 2020), rapid transition also risks significant social contestation under conditions whereby citizens reject proposed actions (Smith 2003; Ford and Norgaard 2020).

When carbon reduction proposals directly affect local residents’ amenities and energy services (e.g. commerce, transport, production, consumption, and waste) the required changes to the social practices of households and neighbourhoods are profound. The success or failure of policy interventions to change behaviours and social practices towards rapid low-carbon transitions therefore require meaningful and sustained public engagement (Whitmarsh, O’Neill, and Lorenzoni 2013). Engagement is often discussed as a solution to the problems of distrust, lack of social legitimacy and injustice through processes of sustained dialogue, two-way information exchange, and social learning. Engagement differs from piecemeal consultation or opinion polling, in which “top-of-the-mind” responses are given without detailed consideration. Opinion polls can mis-represent public responses, either because participants cannot get access to good quality information in advance of their response (i.e. make recommendations in an information-poor environment), because polls are framed badly, or because there is little opportunity for social learning amongst the publics polled (Roelich and Litman-Roventa 2020). The relative advantage of a participatory-deliberative engagement alternative is to establish political equality through active participation (Habermas 1984; Shrader-Frechette 2002), though this is not always achieved in practice (Rydin and Pennington 2000; Irvin and Stansbury 2004). Co-participation in decision-making, through which recommendations are emergent, co-produced and relational (Chilvers and Kearnes 2016), provides a useful lens through which to evaluate decision-making processes. Co-participation aims understand how a diversity of public identities operate within governance, and to account for potential socio-technical changes that materially affect governance (Chilvers and Kearnes 2016). However, although this framing explores differentiated agency between experts and non-experts, it often fails to make explicit the differentiated experiences of participatory exclusion faced by individuals depending on gender, class, ethnicity, disability or other demographic classifications i.e. it runs the risk of assuming that all non-experts have equal participatory parity.

Within this paper, we consider how sociological considerations of power, agency and structure hinder or enable achievement of procedural justice within a citizens’ jury case study. To appropriately evaluate the success of the LCCJ and other participatory-deliberative engagement tools, one must understand the distinction between recognition justice and representation justice. Recognition justice involves including individuals from ordinarily marginalised social groups in decision-making (i.e. through correction of sampling bias, quotas and so on). Representation justice is the enablement of their full participatory parity in deliberation, ensuring that their opinions, rationalities and experiences are fairly included in the value trade-offs involved in decision-making (Fraser and Honneth 2003; Thew 2018; Thew, Middlemiss, and Paavola 2020), thus working to address power inequalities inherent in interpersonal dialogue between individuals.

Nearly 50 years of research into the social psychology of procedural justice can help us understand how citizens experience the processes of justice interventions such as deliberation. Findings across legal, policing, local governance and organisational deliberative settings demonstrate that people care about voice (being heard) and being treated with dignity and respect for reasons that are more than about the instrumental value of their involvement in addressing policy concerns (Thibaut and Walker 1975; Barrett-Howard and Tyler 1986; e.g. Tyler 1988; Lind and Tyler 1988; Tyler and Blader 2003; MacCoun 2005).

The capabilities approach, promoted by Nussbaum and Sen (Nussbaum 2003) highlights how personal, social and environmental barriers might prevent individuals from achieving participation in collective political processes and the life of the community (Middlemiss et al. 2019; Wood and Roelich 2019). Though as Emmel (Emmel et al. 2007; Emmel 2017) notes, the tendency to characterise individuals as “vulnerable” fails to account for the personal resilience and agency some may have to overcome normal barriers to participation, despite their economic and social position. This is important because change agents can be individuals who do not hold positions of formal power within an organisation (Davis and Coan 2015, 250–251). Understanding where hidden power dynamics may hinder participatory parity is therefore an important element of achieving procedural justice (Bond 2011). Our analysis is timely because whilst the emphasis from climate emergency activists has been on urgency in decision-making for action (Climate Emergency Declaration 2019), justice scholars strongly emphasise fairness-of-process (Shrader-Frechette 2002; Delina and Sovacool 2018), and this tension is of critical importance in achieving just transition.

The Leeds Citizens’ Climate Jury

Leeds is a large city in the U.K. with a population of nearly 800,000 inhabitants (Leeds Observatory 2020). It is a city and region in West Yorkshire with a long history of manufacturing, fossil fuel extraction and industrial development, making it a critical site of just transition planning. Leeds City Council’s declaration of climate emergency can be understood as a form of urban democratic engagement to achieve just transition outcomes. The declaration committed the local authority to take rapid measures across industries and sectors to implement a net zero carbon emissions outcome by 2030 (Leeds City Council 2020). Among the initiatives designed to promote community support for the measures, the Leeds Citizens’ Climate Jury (LCCJ) was established by an independent local body, the Leeds Climate Commission a coalition of key organisations and actors from across the city and from the public, private and third sectors, which is informed by the work of the UK Committee on Climate Change (Leeds Climate Commission 2020a), to debate future courses of policy and practice (Leeds Climate Commission 2020a). The LCCJ provides an opportunity for urban policy makers to design net zero planning that recognises the broader inequalities that persist within the Leeds City Region (Leeds City Council, Intelligence and Policy Service 2019). Solutions for a just net zero transition must not only provide green jobs (McCauley and Heffron 2018), but also include an awareness of the lived experience of local citizens in areas such as energy poverty (Middlemiss and Gillard 2015), urban mobility, water and food consumption and waste disposal. The LCCJ was subject to an oversight panel to scrutinise the process and reduce bias, which included representatives from Extinction Rebellion, Friends of the Earth, Leeds Chamber of Commerce, Leeds City Council, The Madina Town Movement, Our Future Leeds, Project Rome, Racial Justice Network, University of Leeds, Yorkshire Water and Youth Strike for Climate (Leeds Climate Commission 2020b). The panel made decisions about the recruitment process and selected 22 expert commentators to give presentations to the LCCJ and answer questions from them (Leeds Climate Commission 2020b).

The jury met for a total of 30 hours split over nine sessions, from 12 September to 3 November 2019. Shared Future, a community interest company, was contracted to provide two professional facilitators to coordinate and support the jurors throughout the process. Jurors were asked to consider the following question: “What should Leeds do about the emergency of climate change?” Following deliberation, jurors produced a list of 12 recommendations, addressing transport, housing, communications, finance, green spaces, aviation, a proposal for a Leeds Green New Deal, plastics, recycling and political co-operation (see list of recommendations). The recommendations, in the jurors’ own words, were presented at a launch event on Monday 25 November 2019 at The Tetley, a popular venue in Leeds city centre. The recommendations were also presented formally to Leeds City Council’s Climate Emergency Advisory Committee in January 2019, which makes formal recommendations to Leeds City Council’s executive board (Leeds Climate Commission 2020b).

Research questions and evaluative process

Citizens’ juries have been promoted as a democratic engagement tool that can enable greater procedural justice in planning climate change response strategies (including adaptation, mitigation and transformation) at local authority level (Capstick et al. 2020). As urban and regional authorities around the world consider citizens’ juries to build trust and achieve diverse representation in net zero carbon decision-making, our research aims to fill a gap in knowledge regarding how such ideals play out in practice through empirical examination of the factors that enable and constrain procedural justice in practice during the deliberation. The critical policy analysis of the LCCJ draws upon the evaluative work of Smith (2003), exploring themes related to deliberative democratic engagement, environmental values, the consensus goals of communicative rationality within an idealised discussion space (Habermas 1984), and the contestation arising from a plurality of value positions (Bond 2011).

Smith’s criteria (2003, 80–81) are adapted here as key research questions to frame the qualitative analysis:

1. Inclusiveness: Are all voices heard? If not, how are they represented?

2. Unconstrained dialogue: is deliberation defended against strategic action on the part of powerful interests? Are the conditions in place for the cultivation of judgement as enlarged mentality?

3. A just decision: what type of decision rule is in operation? Does this affect the nature of deliberations?

4. Sensitivity to environmental values and conditions: can the plurality of environmental values be articulated? Are deliberations and decisions sensitive to heterogenous voices involved in the participatory process?

To assess these criteria our study design drew together multiple qualitative data sources, including observational, written and interview sources across the lifetime of the jury (details of data types and sources are shown in Table 1).¹ Data interpretation is consonant with a constructivist analysis (Emmel 2013), whereby the function of coding is to elucidate underlying power structures, social norms and institutional frameworks that influence participant experiences and outcomes of participation in the LCCJ. The aim is to construct a dialogue between data collection and theorising (Emmel 2013), emphasising the positionality of the researcher including recognition of partiality of knowledge. Interviews were understood to be spaces where knowledge is co-constructed between researcher and interviewee, rather than as tools for knowledge excavation (Mason 2002, 63–64).

Table 1. Data sources.

Data source	Collection period
Observations of jury sessions in the form of researchers handwritten notes and recordings	September 2019–November 2019
Documentation from Shared Futures (independent facilitating organisation) regarding the planning and organisation of the jury sessions	September–December 2019
Interviews with jurors (n=13, 7 female, 6 male) In person, average 35min, semi-structured.	December 2019–February 2020
Interview with facilitator (n=1)	February 2020
Observation of Leeds City Council Climate Emergency Advisory Committee meeting where the LCCJ recommendations were presented	January 2020
Monthly update emails from Leeds City Council on response to the climate emergency	January–March 2020 (3 emails)
Leeds Climate Commission publications about LCCJ	September 2019–March 2020
Leeds City Council report on response to the climate emergency, including sections responding to the recommendations of the LCCJ	January 2020
Video of the launch of jury recommendations	December 2019

Interviews were transcribed and coded thematically using NVivo™ qualitative data analysis software. Through a process of inductive iterations 15–20 emergent themes were produced in a nested hierarchy. The themes corresponded to different elements found within the research questions. We also conducted observation/documentation of local outcomes emerging at the city level, for example attending the Leeds City Council Climate Emergency Advisory Committee meeting where they heard and debated recommendations emerging from the LCCJ. The recommendations were presented in video format, read by the jurors themselves.

Research findings are limited by the voluntary self-selection of interviewees (8 of the 21 jurors did not volunteer to be interviewed). Individuals who expressed climate change skepticism, those with disabilities and those from a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) background were under-represented in the interview responses. The authors reflect on how class effects such as imposter syndrome and jurors being too busy to volunteer time for the interview (Bell 2020) could have contributed to this under-representation of BAME participants. We are aware that our qualitative research suffers as a result. This under-representation in the research process also serves as a practical illustration of how exclusion from participatory equality in climate governance can take place (Bell 2020).

Results

This section covers firstly, findings classified according to Smith’s characteristics of environmentally focussed deliberation, and secondly, a description of the co-benefits of the jury process.

Employing Smith’s criteria for evaluating models of Green deliberative democracy

Inclusiveness. Leeds city region has a diverse population, including a substantial proportion of people living on low incomes and/or from BAME communities (Leeds Observatory 2020). Recognising this diversity, a form of stratified sampling was followed by an independent third party, the Sortition Foundation, to select a demographically representative sample from the local population according to age, gender, ethnicity, residential location (geography and deprivation), disability and views on climate change (Shared Futures 2019). Leeds Observatory (2020) population statistics were used to calculate the numbers of participants. 4000 households across Leeds were randomly sampled from the Royal Mail’s address database. Average attendance over the 9 sessions was 21 participants. Participants were recruited across 10 different categories of multiple deprivation, as a proxy for class. The recruitment breakdown was as follows (Shared Futures 2019, 9–10):

• Age groups: 15–29 years old (6), 30–44 (5), 45–59 (6), 60+ (4)

• Gender: Males (11), Females (10)

• Ethnicity: White (16), Asian (3), Black (2)

• Indices of deprivation (based on deciles 1–10 as experienced by residents in the Leeds City Region): 1–2 (7), 3–4 (2), 5–6 (4), 7–8 (5), 9–10 (3)

• Disability: Yes (6), No (15)

• Attitude to climate change: Very concerned: (6), fairly concerned (10), not concerned (5)

Each member of the jury received a £25 gift voucher per session attended. Participants were also able to claim travel and care expenses. Despite targeted recruitment, jury composition was over-representative of civic-minded, politically aware individuals (Bryant and Hall 2017). Interviewees were asked why they responded to the invitation letter to take part, and reasons given included a desire to meet new people, a pre-existing interest in climate change or a desire to learn more, motivation in the form of compensation through shopping vouchers, a desire to “play one’s part” in decision making (i.e. a sense of civic duty).

[The shopping voucher] was the main reason [for responding to the invitation in the post] and then just like I wasn’t really doing anything on Thursday evening, so I thought, “Why not?” and plus it would have like a benefit to society, like just thought that our views can actually input, that it can actually make a change. (Faraha)

There was a broad array of self-selection motivations, which operated within the structured, pre-determined sampling process. Most jurors felt that the recognition of demographic diversity, addressed by the selection of jurors, was a strength of the process, however, some were sceptical about whether single individuals from the various demographic profiles could adequately represent broader segments of society.

Unconstrained dialogue. Two key factors emerged from the data as being responsible for shaping and forming the deliberative space:

1. Facilitation

2. Individual jurors: personalities, communication dynamics within the group

Additional factors included the commentators’ content and style, and practical arrangements such as the meeting space, tools used for dialogue, language, location, and timing.

Facilitation. It was observed that the personality, approach, style of the facilitators, and the tools they used, were crucial to achieving maximum levels of inclusive participation in discussion. All interviewees spoke highly of the facilitators regarding group management and relationship-building. Their impartiality, approachability and ability to relate personally and with warmth to each member of the diverse group were highlighted as valued attributes. The importance of these facets in building trust within the participant groups from the beginning of the process was evident:

[They] were so friendly and welcoming on the first night, you felt at ease the minute you walked through the door. You felt confident and safe with them. (Rose)

Peter and Jennifer were the facilitators of the jury sessions, who acted as intermediaries between the jury and the external professionals and experts who come to present to the group. They were also intermediaries between the oversight panel, who sets the agenda for discussion, and the jury. They established a high level of trust with the group of jurors, with interviewees commenting on their ability be impartial regarding the issue under discussion so as not to alienate those jurors with views different to their own.

They were great … I couldn’t tell you what I thought their views were on climate change, to be honest! … I’m not great at speaking in a group, I’d prefer to listen to people and wait until there’s a silence before speaking … Pete … I don’t know if he can read your body language … he’d often say: “You look like you want to say something” and I was like “Yeah I do!”. (Aisling)

Individual jurors. A wide range of facilitation tools were used in order to vary the style of deliberation, accommodating the variety of approaches favoured by different individuals from large and small group discussions, to speed dating-type conversations (one to one), moments of silent reflection, voting, written and map-based exercises. Facilitators were constantly on the lookout for participants who may have been excluded, or self-excluding, from large and small group conversations. This required reflexivity on their part, constant attention and the ability to respond by creatively adapting the sessions and programme to enable better inclusion.

They were marvellous. Both of them were so good … You could read the room. They knew what they were doing. You felt like you could trust them. Everything was explained … It was like “if you don’t want it, it doesn’t happen. If you want to get involved, get involved, but if you don’t, don’t worry about it”. So, they made us feel very comfortable, very at ease. (Charlotte)

Approachability was important and the gender balance amongst facilitators allowed participants to comfortably discuss any concerns regarding the content of sessions, or barriers to attendance, with a member of the same sex if necessary.

Given the important role facilitators play in citizens’ juries, this research highlights how their personal and professional characteristics warrant further research. Even when diverse demographic representation is achieved in recruitment of the jury, the facilitated deliberation can enable or hinder the achievement of procedural justice, for example via the development of trust between actors: between commentators and jurors, facilitators and jurors, and among the individual jurors themselves. In turn, levels of trust relationships can influence the recommendations that are eventually developed and delivered.

For each participant to raise their views within the group, all individuals must be made to feel comfortable in sharing their views and experiences. One participant, John, explained that there had been an exercise in the first session that made the jurors talk to each other as people rather than vehicles for argument. He felt that this was very helpful, recognising his own positionality within the city and the limitations of living in a “bubble”:

Even though Leeds is quite … a multicultural city, I don’t tend to talk to other people outside of my circle or my demographic group and I think it was very good to do that and to understand other people’s views and what they were interested in … it was a really powerful exercise and it helped the group bond and even though we did have disagreements, I think it was on the whole a very civilised approach. (John)

Decision making: What type of decision rule is in operation? Does this affect the nature of deliberation? Interviewees felt they had been meaningfully involved and engaged in the development of the final set of recommendations. The final choices happened very quickly during a silent vote during the afternoon of the all-day session, which followed eight previous evening sessions, and there were questions about whether more time for deliberation should have been allowed prior to the voting. However, all interviewees felt that their individual contributions were heard in the discussions before consensus was reached via silent voting. Many jurors stated that the process of choosing recommendations had already occurred throughout preceding group discussions. Many said they were pleasantly surprised to see their own words included verbatim in the final report, and some presented their words at the launch in person, and/or read their own words for a video recording which was circulated at Leeds City Council Climate Emergency Advisory Committee meeting and elsewhere by Leeds Climate Commission. This is therefore evidence of a process of empowerment – that non-specialist climate jurors felt comfortable in relaying their positions in a formal political decision-setting.

Selection of members of the oversight panel is an area where the type of decision rule used was not transparent, and it is important to consider this because choices made by the panel had a key role in determining how the jury ran. The panel included members from the private sector, public sector and non-profit/charity sector. This helped to create balance, but it is suspected that availability of time and personal interest in climate change and/or local democracy influenced which organisations put forward members to be on the panel. The strong involvement of academics from the university was important, as academics are sometimes seen as trustworthy, less biased experts by the public. In this case, two leading climate governance academics were involved whose personal and professional networks would have been difficult to ignore in the panel recruitment process. However, these academics, although passionate about addressing climate change, are also deeply concerned with justice and fair procedures. This was illustrated in the way the oversight panel limited its own power by allowing the jurors themselves to choose three of the six themes of the deliberations. The breadth that they could choose from was to some extent limited by the ability of the oversight panel to then find local experts available to contribute their time to the jury with little advance warning.

Some jurors also changed or adapted their positions on climate change respone through participating in the jury, showing the capacity for citizens’ juries to facilitate enlarged mentality.

I weren’t [sic] really aware that they had a climate emergency so … when [the invitation letter] first come, I thought “oh”, it nearly went in the bin to be honest … and then I thought, I carried on reading and I thought, “do you know what, I’ll go and see what it’s all about and give it a whirl” … now, since doing it … I think you sort of take note of more what’s going on around you, up ‘til that point I didn’t know. (Lydia)

Q: “Did your own views change through the process?” A: Yeah, I realised that actually we do all need to do something and it actually changed my mind about buying a particular vehicle. (Paul)

Others who were previously self-declared “environmentally conscious” but had not understood why climate change was being characterised as an emergency, began to interpret the science through the lens of urgency and in the context of the wider-scale responses already underway. Many became more determined to take personal action, showing evidence of growing from possession of abstract climate change knowledge to embedded awareness applicable to their daily life. This may be why the recommendations are largely in favour of strong climate change mitigation measures, even though the jurors were recruited to represent a range of perspectives on climate change response.

Plurality of values. This criterion requires that juries can provide a space where diverse, sometimes conflicting ideas can be openly discussed and debated in a culture of fair representation and open-minded reception (Smith 2003). Smith asks “can the plurality of environmental values be articulated? Are deliberations and decisions sensitive to the scope, scale and complexity of environmental issues?” (Smith 2003, 81). Deliberation under conditions of plurality may involve the “laundering of preferences” such that individuals move towards views and positions that are less self-orientated and more able to benefit community-level welfare (Bryant and Hall 2017; Roelich and Litman-Roventa 2020), though this does not always occur (Price 2000).

To answer the first of these: in the case of the LCCJ, an effort was made to recruit climate sceptics, non-experts and those who knew little about climate change, as well as individuals already committed to addressing climate change. The oversight panel sought to organise presentations from individuals with economic and political views ranging from support for degrowth through to supporters of the neoliberal economic mainstream. Interviewees mostly felt that a fair range of views was represented, with some saying that the balance was weighted towards a more pro-environmental critique of economic growth and consumption. Though all interviewees stated that their personal opinions were adequately heard, and some gave examples of how they broadened their own views by listening to others e.g.:

I thought generally the group did pretty well to kind of respect different people’s opinions … it felt like it was quite a sort of safe place to aim, you didn’t feel like you were being judged, you felt like you could have an open discussion with people … I was able to talk to people and pick up ideas from people and think, “oh that’s a good idea”. (David)

A number of interviewees mentioned that through the process of participation in the LCCJ they gained knowledge and confidence to speak to others about climate change and take action personally e.g. in the workplace, at home. Interviewees mostly found the expert commentators approachable, felt that they were able to ask questions in large group sessions and small groups, and during breaks. They appreciated that any unanswered questions were followed up by experts submitting written answers later, and that many commentators made themselves available via skype on the final, full-day session when recommendations were written.

I didn’t realise the amount of information would be so in-depth and the expertise presented would be at the level it was. (John)

I talk about it a lot more at home and with friends and family … every time we eat, it’s a little discussion … one of boys will say, “Mum, we’re doing this at school” … we’re trying the meat free days … yeah, they all sort of seem to be taking a little bit more notice now, a bit more interested. (Lydia)

Beyond the framework: co-benefits of deliberation

Several positive co-benefits of deliberation became apparent throughout the data collection period. We classify these as unexpected results because they expand the range of criteria for deliberative process evaluation. There is reason to explore these co-benefits of local deliberation further and consider how they might help aid a socially-just decarbonisation process in the UK if replicated elsewhere:

Identified co-benefits included:

• Relationship building between members of diverse social groups

• The development of hope in the face of climate change concerns

• Place identity and local pride, and

• Trust between experts and non-expert citizens. N.B. high levels of trust between individuals and organisations is valuable for governance at a local level and it can be increasingly acknowledged as necessary to build in the UK’s economically divided society (Powell, Krebel, and Lerven 2019).

Relationship building between members of diverse social groups. All interviewees spoke of the jury group in positive terms, with a number stating they were able to get to know participants from social groups that they would not otherwise have had much contact within their ordinary daily life. Not only were they able to interact with these individuals who may have had very different life experiences, but they also had the opportunity to hear and understand what these other participants felt about climate change and its impact on their city, livelihood, lifestyle and wellbeing. In an environment enabling respectful communication, they were able to build trust and appreciate difference. Such experiences establish good practice in co-operation – a vital component of effective climate action. One older, white, jury member called Marta, explained that during one of the early sessions there was a discussion about the juror’s personal visions for Leeds in 2030 during which she was sitting next to a younger, Asian male juror. At first glance she thought he, and others in the group, might not share a similar vision for the city but she was surprised to find that many were longing for similar things to herself:

The general longing for a rootedness and for feeling safe in your own community simply by knowing who other people are and what they think and not feeling so alone and fragmented in the world … we all live in these isolated little pockets around the place but actually, our basic needs for decent housing, decent transport, for healthy and social communications is all the same across the place. (Marta)

For Marta, identifying common needs and hopes for their shared urban space helped the group to bond and to view one another as fellow human beings with potential to collaborate on a shared issue.

Hope for the future. For several of the jury, participating gave them hope that humans could work together across diverse social categories to address the environmental crisis (which, generally speaking, they found a depressing situation).

I went into it with the view, in effect, that the human race had effectively wiped itself out, and it would well be deserved. And actually the process has built for the first time, hope. (Michael)

It was kind of … quite a heartening experience actually. (Marta)

Place attachment and local pride. Some interviewees described feeling a sense of locality, of getting to know other people who were very familiar with the city as residents and cared about it as much as they did, which encouraged them to pro-environmentally friendly activity where they might have previously been demotivated e.g. recycling. The also stated that participating in the jury made them “feel proud of Leeds”. This is significant because place identity is increasingly being recognised as an important mechanism for values-based management of environmental resources, offering respectful, reciprocal relationships between people and local natural resources (Artelle et al. 2018). For example:

It was funny, I thought Leeds could happily put itself on the map through this, through this climate change thing, let’s be frontrunners in that one … That felt good and that was brought to the fore by having some enthusiastic reports of certain topics … suddenly there was a nice feeling to own that process a bit more. (Marta)

I think a lot of us were trying to put that across, I’m really proud to live here and I do consider this to be my home and you do care about the place you live in, you want it to be the best it can be and it’s nice to see that ordinary people feel the same. (Rose)

Building trust between citizens and decision makers. The erosion of trust in climate change knowledge gatekeepers, both scientific and political is a crucial challenge. Diversity of online information and reporting, the reliance upon social media algorithms to serve up information based upon previous interests, and the difficulty citizens have in differentiating between reliable and unreliable sources of information remain paramount. The jury process gave an opportunity for members of the public to get to know the leaders and experts in climate change research and local decision-making. Some jurors highlighted the value of meeting climate scientists from the University and also members of Leeds City Council, including those involved in planning for transport and housing. Two university professors in particular were mentioned by many of the interviewees as being particularly helpful for their learning about the issue and decision-making, because they felt they could trust them. One in particular was identified as being personally passionate about Leeds and having a relatable communication style. These features build trust and the trust-building dynamic went in both directions – the researchers, experts and decision-makers who spoke to the group and were questioned by them were generally enthused afterwards by the engagement and interest shown to their work. Many left feeling encouraged that non-specialist citizens, when given appropriate information and time to absorb it, could make forward-thinking and socially-just recommendations with quite a radical response to climate change.

Discussion: opportunities provided by citizens’ juries in a just transition

Smith’s four evaluative criteria for meaningful deliberation align closely with justice theory: the first, inclusiveness, is similar to recognition justice, while unconstrained dialogue, a just decision, and sensitivity to plural environmental values and conditions combine to form the deliberative space and achieve representation justice. The LCCJ largely met Smiths’ criteria for meaningful deliberation; being an example of best-case facilitation. However, a close examination of the process shows where gaps may exist in similar democratic procedures. This case also expands Smith’s criteria – as issues of empowerment, capacity building, and social co-benefits are identified as outcomes of the jury’s deliberation.

The stratified sampling recruitment process can expand decision-making participation beyond that of a normal council or parliamentary constituency voting. This has modest recognition justice implications as understood by Fraser (Fraser 1997; Fraser and Honneth 2003; Thew, Middlemiss, and Paavola 2020). However, whilst recognition justice is embodied in a citizens’ jury recruitment process, the more challenging phenomenon of achieving representation justice is possible within a citizens’ jury process, though this is not guaranteed. The LCCJ was facilitated to a high standard to allow maximum representation through dialogue, in keeping with a growing professionalisation of facilitation practice. Yet the success of a citizens’ jury in enabling procedural justice of this kind depends not only on methodological design and facilitation procedure, but also the agency and personal characteristics of the jurors in discussion, the practical conditions of the meetings and the expert commentators communication content and style.

Individuals have differential ability to access opportunities for participation depending upon the intersection of personal life experiences, background, ethnicity, age, gender identity, and social class (Emmel et al. 2007; Manstead 2018). To give an example, a Leeds City Council climate emergency report proposed a 300% increase in cycling rates to reduce the number of cars on the roads (Leeds City Council 2020). However, there is evidence that women and BAME citizens in the UK are currently less likely to cycle than men or white citizens (Lam 2019), for various cultural and social reasons. The impact of socio-cultural differences upon the support and uptake of climate action has significant impact upon participation practice and procedure. The tension between organisational structure and the deliberative capacity of agents operating within it, is therefore important to justice theorising. Contrary to popular economic and citizenship theories that portray individuals as rational, independent actors with equal access to information and ability to communicate; in reality of course individuals are constrained by social norms, cultural, gender, and class identities that act as barriers to participation (Anantharaman et al. 2019). Individuals also have differential ability to engage in group discussion and articulate their views in written or verbal form. These forces could be seen at work within the LCCJ group, for example where jurors articulated significantly different influences affecting their capacity to have their views heard within the jury discussions. A number of individuals felt that the facilitators drew out their opinions when they were otherwise planning to remain silent, while some joked about being asked to speak less to make room for others’ voices.

In certain situations, individuals may self-exclude from discussions and debates due to self-perception that they are “imposters” within a culturally ascribed space, or else they feel they have insufficient expertise to make a contribution. In science-focused deliberation such exclusion actively works against the full and meaningful participation of women, minorities, and those from working-class backgrounds. There is evidence that dominant “middle-class social norms” concerning language, communication styles, and professional interpersonal behaviour (e.g. emotion regulation) can make participants from other social groups feel alienated and unable to engage in full and free participation (Friedman, Laurison, and Miles 2015; Anantharaman et al. 2019; Bell 2020). It takes specific and focussed facilitation skills to create a group culture where individuals may overcome unequal power relations, stemming from social hierarchies, to participate fully and equitably within a jury setting (Bryant and Hall 2017). Some jurors overcame established social barriers to participate, allowing them to influence decision-making when they would not otherwise have been able to. Many jurors would not have had the knowledge, social position, contacts or confidence to influence similar city-level discussions outside of the jury process. One example was Faraha, a younger woman who did not think she could M.C. the recommendations launch party and said she would not have put herself forward voluntarily but was eventually able to do it with the support and encouragement of the facilitators and the other members of the jury.

The latter are important findings because they provide deeper insights into technical responses to climate change mitigation than those commonly proffered by public acceptance or public perception theories. Public acceptance or perception theories stem primarily from an understanding of individuals as independent rational actors with access to information to guide their choices, as embodied in mainstream economics and psychology disciplines (Wüstenhagen, Wolsink, and Bürer 2007; Upham, Oltra, and Boso 2015). Focussing on engagement with decarbonisation moves towards a more sociological understanding of agency, where individuals are influenced by the relationships and politics of the society in which they live, and the cultural systems that determine our understanding of reality through social hierarchies, communication and interaction (Navarro 2006).

Being part of a citizens’ jury allows the participants to move beyond their immediate knowledge base and self-interest to “cultivate judgement as enlarged mentality” (Smith 2003, 81) – a process that ascribes opportunities but also embodies risk:

 … the transformative potential of interaction is that it can provide opportunities for learning from difference … where the social knowledge of others differently situated is enhanced and extended … [however] some critics remain troubled by its reliance on rationality and reason for legitimacy. (Bond 2011, 166–167)

Bond suggests three ways that deliberative dialogue might limit social learning: (1) through privileging rational argumentation over other affective, emotional or embodied forms of talk, (2) by hegemonically defining the common interest, therefore perpetuating already existing marginalisation, and (3) by aiming for a rationally justified consensus as the outcome of argumentation, thereby potentially subordinating alternative forms of talk (Bond 2011). It is possible to identify facets of the aforementioned risks embodied in the LCCJ, despite it being widely acknowledged as a successful process by many involved. Interviewees mentioned that to improve the jury process, facilitators could have drawn out the climate sceptics or those who have social and economic concerns above environmental concerns earlier in the process, with debate across a broader range of contested values. This could have been achieved by facilitators or the organisers early on by highlighting to jurors that value trade-offs need to be made, clearly discouraging a form of “blue sky thinking” where the list of recommendations raises expectations that cannot easily be met by either the jury sponsors (Leeds Climate Commission), the council, or local businesses.

A number of Leeds jurors were inspired by the vision for urban transformation articulated by one commentator in particular, but achievement of his goals required high levels of (sometimes contentious) political activism. Although this challenge was energising for some jurors, others felt it was out of their reach to participate in such activities. For example, one registered nurse who demonstrated considerable passion for the issues at stake felt that her employment commitments required her to remain a-political in public life; thereby she was unable to participate in contentious activism. Some jurors were simply too busy with work or caring responsibilities to travel across town to participate in ongoing activism, despite being invited through the WhatsApp group established for post-jury communication. As found in other evaluations of participant action following a deliberative process, for many participants “life gets in the way” of sustained engagement in the issue at hand (Devine-Wright and Cotton 2017).

The co-benefits of deliberation as evidenced by LCCJ are closely linked to the description of deliberative democracy outlined by Smith, but there is additional depth and nuance to the evaluative framework presented here. In the present-day political and social space of the United Kingdom, there is a need for the co-benefits identified: relationship building between members of diverse social groups, hope for the future, place attachment and the development of local pride in Northern communities, as well as institutional trust building. Moreover, the limits of regional capacity to act need to be considered. Leeds City Council was honest about the limits of its capacity to respond to all recommendations due to its mandate and financial constraints. If the recommendations are not fully implemented this may lessen the efficacy of the procedural justice achieved via representation on the LCCJ, and thus responsibility for just climate action is distributed across the broader regional economy, not simply the local authority. Though the LCCJ itself showed promise of inclusivity and effective deliberative process management, early observations suggest that the impact of the recommendations upon city plans may be limited. This requires further research, along with investigations into the differences between deliberative democracy on a city governance-scale compared to national-scale forms, such as the UK Citizens’ Climate Assembly (Climate Assembly UK 2020).

The necessity for wider participation in decision-making is revealed through consideration of the existing constituency for urban development planning. For example, there are far more men than women, and fewer persons of BAME identity, involved in senior levels of decision-making within the engineering sector and environmental consultancies and planners who are currently leading and regulating change in the UK (Arup UK 2019; Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE) 2019; Royal Town Planning Institute 2020a). It also is increasingly acknowledged that growing economic inequality has contributed to a lack of trust in UK leaders and politicians, who set the course for change with regard to green infrastructure investment (Powell, Krebel, and Lerven 2019b). Representation and recognition within citizens’ juries can therefore serve to enhance trust for improved governance of climate action. However, some procedural justice literature cautions that ostensible “fairness” of procedures driven by actors with greater power and decision-control can lull participants into a false sense of experiencing justice, even when this is not actually the case objectively (MacCoun 2005). In this way, procedural justice processes such as citizens’ juries could potentially provide a public cover for ongoing injustice in the distribution of the costs and benefits of decarbonisation. This provides an argument for ensuring that recommendations emerging from citizens’ juries are actually implemented, and for the close monitoring of processes to avoid closing down conversations due to “framing” and power dynamics within deliberation (Blue and Dale 2016; Romsdahl 2020). The scope of this study was concentrated on the latter and therefore was unable to examine the implementation of jury recommendations, however the evaluation of this should be a focus of future research.

Conclusions

As climate emergency declarations by local authorities are a recent and growing global phenomenon, findings from this study aim to inform local authorities regarding the potential role of deliberative processes in achieving social justice and legitimacy for transformative action in low carbon transitions. Our research proffers empirical evaluation of participation within a demographically diverse UK city attempt to respond to climate emergency through democratic innovation that engages different social, cultural and material characteristics of local residents. We adopt a normative position that cities cannot act responsibly on climate change without attending to existing socio-economic inequalities for four reasons. Firstly, because greater political feasibility is required to meet the net zero targets of the climate emergency declarations (Patterson et al. 2018); secondly, because over half of the reduction of GHG emissions required depends on behavioural change by citizens (62% of the UK Committee on Climate Change’s pathway, Stark 2019), and thirdly, because low carbon lifestyles are enabled and constrained by local infrastructure provision (Roelich and Litman-Roventa 2020). Fourthly, there is widespread acknowledgement that current urban planning systems fail to achieve participatory parity between citizens (Natarajan et al. 2019). The LCCJ and other similar citizens’ jury approaches can provide two-way dialogue between citizens and city leaders and build locally relevant knowledge, institutional trust and deliberative capacity especially for residents on low incomes. This approach can reveal new ways of living in the city that represent low-carbon practices and can provide guidance or information for others:

It is not just the well-off who have good ideas. The quotidian, pro-environmental practices of the working classes are also key to any sustainability transition. (Anantharaman et al. 2019, 196)

Within this broader goal, the impartial facilitation and careful oversight that the LCCJ presented led to an increase in carbon literacy and the opportunity of meaningful engagement and trust-building among diverse local residents. The LCCJ developed a set of far-reaching recommendations for socially-just, rapid and transformative climate action at the city-level. However, the actual outcomes and impacts of LCCJ recommendations upon government, the private sector and the third sector are contested and worthy of further research. The mechanism for evaluating outcomes of deliberation are as relevant as those of process (Rowe and Frewer 2004). Further research within other local urban contexts is also required to develop comparative analysis of justice within climate change governance across regional demographic contexts. For example, do cities with less economic and/or social diversity experience procedural justice differently to Leeds? Can other deliberative democracy tools such as citizen forums or focus groups perform comparably to juries, in a procedural justice sense? Do these alternative tools offer the same co-benefits as juries?

The lessons gained from this research to other urban climate emergency contexts are as follows. First, now that it is widely recognised that procedural justice considerations should be at the forefront of responsive governance measures, citizens’ juries can provide one useful tool for supporting a just transition dependent on local context. Second, in the use of citizens juries it is imperative that recognition of power differentials between various social groups are analysed and considered carefully through the process. For procedural justice to be ensured, more must be done than simply recruiting demographic diversity into decision-making spaces. Representation justice demands that those who are included are able to harness their position of inclusion to voice their experiences, opinions, hopes and concerns in deciding what trade-offs will be made. In citizens’ juries, facilitation style and techniques play a critical role in achieving this participatory parity, alongside other factors such as the nature of individual personalities within the group. Finally, the LCCJ and other similar models provide opportunity for important co-benefits to emerge, such as trust-building, place identity and hope. We therefore recommend the scaling-up and scaling-across of this citizen jury model to other regional contexts given the potential of this model to meet many of the complex elements of just transition goals.

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the Leeds citizens’ climate jury organisers and the jurors themselves, who kindly participated in this research. Our gratitude goes also to the White Rose Doctoral Training Programme, which provided a UK Economic and Social Research Council doctoral research scholarship for the first author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).