The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the search of for effective tools for public participation in general and public deliberation in specific in strategic environmental assessment (SEA) through an experiment with citizens’ juries in municipal energy planning. The experiment with a deliberative democratic tool is thought to lead to more legitimate public policy decisions. The experiment combines design principles of citizens’ juries with scenario methodologies (Shell/GBN). The evaluation of the experiment is structured around a framework of analysis derived from Jürgen Habermas’s notion of discourse as an ideal democratic procedure.

The results show that the citizens’ jury enabled a constructive exchange of information and arguments and co-operation between ordinary citizens and experts. This indicates that citizens’ juries is a participatory tool that can be used to represent a means for reforming SEA in a more deliberative democratic direction. But the analysis also revealed a number of distortions in the communicative process. These distortions indicate how the deliberative democratic potential can be further increased through revisions of the institutional arrangements of the decision-making process. Furthermore, regarding effects of deliberation, it is clear that the participatory process generated new and fruitful ideas and that the citizens increased their knowledge through participating in the process.

This article presents a model for local energy planning and its application in a full-scale experiment in a Swedish municipality. The model is based on legal requirement, research findings and standards of good practice and includes a combination of analytical and procedural tools intended to support rational decision-making: external scenarios, a citizens' panel, life cycle analysis and qualitative environmental assessment (EA). The application of the model indicates that the decision-support tools selected can give several new and valuable inputs to local energy planning, such as local knowledge and values through citizen dialogue and comprehensive EAs. However, the experiment also shows that there are several challenges involved in applying the tools, for example, it is difficult to get citizens and the industry to participate and that it is complicated to combine several different tools for decisionmaking into a single planning process. Moreover, the experiences from the application suggest that the model for local energy planning show great potential but needs to be improved before it can be used as a standard of good practice.