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.