Resources

This video accompanies the handbook " Teach Yourself Citizens Juries". It comprises two films: one about jurors from Lancashire, UK, talking about their citizens juries on youth, alcohol and illegal drugs; the other is a record of a citizens jury organised by older people in Tyneside exploring the challenges facing those who suffer falls and looking at potential policy changes. The video also covers: choosing a subject, setting the question for the jury, recruiting jurors, jury members questionin the witnesses, and maximising results.

These Plans profile the tsunami-affected village, its political economy and the post-tsunami realities, aspirations and challenges of the communities. They present a community-led pre-tsunami social map, in order to establish public documents, detailing the property ownership that existed before the tsunami.

These five briefings explain the Deliberative Mapping (DM) approach, which is designed to help specialists and members of the public weigh up evidence to reach a joint decision on a complex policy issue where there is no obvious way forward. The methodology can be applied to a problem to judge how well different courses of action perform according to a set of economic, social, ethical and scientific criteria. The aim is to use this approach as the basis for more robust, democratic and accountable decision making which better reflects public values. DM integrates two independent but complementary approaches to informing decision making: stakeholder decision analysis (SDA) which is a qualitative group based process; and Multi-Criteria Mapping (MCM) which is a quantitative, computer-assisted interview process. The first briefing, Opportunities and challenges for involving citizens in decision making, gives a background and a rationale for the approach and looks at current developments in citizen participation in governance. The second briefing The Deliberative Mapping approach, describes the technique. Briefing three, Deliberative Mapping in practice: the kidney gap, illustrates the application of DM to a case-study analysing the problem of kidney shortages, and summarises how participants appraised the various options for the way forward. Briefing four, Citizens' panels in Deliberative Mapping: a user guide, describes how citizens' panels are used in DM. It focuses on how to run them, and the issues that facilitators and researchers need to address to ensure that the panels work well. Briefing five, Using the Multi-Criteria Mapping (MCM) Technique, describes Multi-Criteria Mapping (MCM), and considers its role in helping individuals identify and explain their preferred ways forward on complex and uncertain problems.

This paper describes a community enumeration and mapping programme in five low-income settlements in Dar es Salaam. The inhabitants documented their settlement and its problems in detail, especially for water and sanitation, with support from the UK charity, WaterAid, and PEVODE, a Tanzanian NGO. The paper describes the planning and implementation of the enumeration and mapping, the information gathered, and how it was used. It looks specifically on some of the issues relating to the privatisation of the public water utilities. It also describes the way in which the process helped establish links between these communities and government agencies, and stimulated local action to address some of the problems identified. The community proved an essential resource in the mapping process. The authors recommend that a more holistic approach should be considered to tackle all of the issues arising in the community, water and sanity can not be specifically isolated. The mapping exercise helped the community to feel empowered to demand support for dealing with issues relating to water and sanitation. The awareness of the privatisation of the water utilities was little, and the authors of this study recommend that organisations such as PEVODE should start an awareness-raising campaign in the community. The study also revealed that other parts (than that in focus for the study) of the city would be affected by the privatisation of the water.