Evaluation of two methods of deliberative participation of older people in food-policy development

This paper reports on an evaluation study of two deliberative methods of public participation of the “hard-to-reach” in food-policy development—the citizens’ workshop and the citizens’ jury. The participation was conducted on a live food-policy topic (food retailing) and the specific hard-to-reach group of older people was recruited. The evaluation of the two methods was based on an assessment of the participants’ and observers’ perceptions of the processes and outcomes of the methods, against a set of evaluation criteria, spanning both the individual and group level of analysis. The evaluation used a quasi-experimental, between groups, pre- and post-participation design. The study showed that the properties of the methods alone, such as availability of extra information, had little impact on both satisfaction with the process and the actual task outcomes. It further emphasised the importance of group debate for the perceived satisfaction with the process and the subjective outcomes of the event. The study illustrated that the high level of process satisfaction was not contemporaneous with the perceived impact of participation, such as its perceived influence of policy decision-making, suggesting that the relationship between participation outcomes (i.e. impact of participation) and processes was a complex one. It is argued here that this relationship should be considered in the light of identity processes and the context of public participation.