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WQ.110/2020
WRITTEN QUESTION TO THE MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT BY DEPUTY R.J. WARD OF ST. HELIER
ANSWER TO BE TABLED ON MONDAY 9th MARCH 2020
Question
Will the Minister outline the selection process for the members of the climate change citizens' panel, including how sortition will be used, if at all?
Answer
The Carbon Neutral Strategy establishes a people-powered approach to get all Islanders involved in discussing, informing and creating Jersey's carbon neutral future. One part of this approach is the creation of a citizens' assembly that will make recommendations about how we should work together to become carbon neutral.
The mandate for a citizens' assembly on climate change, which was agreed unanimously by the States Assembly, sets out that the Assembly will consist of:
• A Chairperson appointed by the Government; and
• At least 49 citizens, randomly selected to be broadly representative of Jersey society.
Recruiting citizens in an anonymous and random way is vital to ensure the validity of the citizens assembly and to safeguard its integrity. To achieve this we will use an independently administered service provided Sortition Foundation. Sortition Foundation are a not for profit organisation that have supported the recruitment of citizens' assemblies for the UK Parliament and Scott ish Parliament, amongst others (see www.sortitionfoundation.org).
The fine details of how the sortition process will be implemented in Jersey will be agreed in the coming weeks, but are likely to include:
• An invitation, sent in late March to all Jersey households, inviting expressions of interest. The invitation will be provided in a range of languages and will be accompanied by information about what the citizens' assembly is an the expected role of participants.
• The stratification of anonymous responses into groups that reflect the age, gender and other characteristics of the population of Jersey.
• The random selection of participants from these groups in order to produce a representative assembly. It is likely that there will be an over-recruitment in order to maintain the total number of citizens that participate in the full citizens' assembly process at 49 or more.
States Members on the Environment, Housing and Infrastructure Scrutiny Panel will have the opportunity to scrutinise this, as agreed by the States Assembly.
Sortition Foundation will also support the recruitment of participants for the citizens' jury on assisted dying, which has been established by the Minister for Health and Community Services. Both the citizens' assembly on climate change and the citizens' jury on assisted Dying are also supported by, and will be facilitated by, independent experts from the New Citizenship Project (www.newcitizenship.org.uk) and Involve (www.involve.org.uk) as part of an approach that will strengthen the in-house capability of the Government of Jersey to make use of participatory policy making approaches in the future.