The joint outcomes of a ‘citizens’ jury’ workshop in North Sulawesi, Indonesia

Abstract

The Bunaken National Park (BNP) is a multiple-use marine national park in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Decisions about how to balance the conservation, tourism, extractive and subsistence needs of different stakeholder groups of the BNP are challenging and often undermined by institutional failure. The main official organisation charged with managing the BNP is supported and shadowed by an NGO-facilitated multi-stakeholder collaboration that can buffer the impacts of institutional failure. One goal of this collaboration is to build decision-making capacity within the community. An evaluation process—a ‘citizens’ jury’—was undertaken for the BNP with the primary purpose of providing a comparison with an environmental evaluation exercise. This evaluation exercise yielded joint outcomes expressed through a declaration by participants to make use of citizens’ juries in future decisions about matters of public importance. The citizens’ jury process is described, and the joint outcomes of the exercise as an evaluation process are discussed. These include community empowerment, the introduction of a community-level deliberative tool, and potential capacity building in decision-making.