Translating Participation: Scenario Workshops and Citizens’ Juries across Situations and Contexts

Abstract

The starting point of this chapter is recent growing interest in and criticism of public participation instruments, that is, ready-made designs for conducting dialogue with stakeholders or the general public. Several participation instruments emerged simultaneously as the idea of ‘good governance’ based on participation and deliberation gained ascendency. Participation instruments have been praised not only by practitioners and policymakers but also by social scientists for how well they function in overcoming expert-lay divisions and preventing technocratic decision-making, and for how easily they travel to new settings. Recent criticism has emphasized the irony that these instruments can in fact impose an extra layer of technocracy: by being carefully designed and increasingly professionalized, they can alienate the public to whom they are intended to give a voice. This chapter will discuss two such participation instruments, ‘the scenario workshop’, as developed by the Danish Board of Technology (DBT), and ‘the do-it-yourself citizens’ jury’, as developed and used by the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Centre at Newcastle University (PEALS).