Stakeholder Analysis Flashcards
Name at least three reasons for involving stakeholders in environmental management.
Engaging stakeholders can help to get more/ unique insight into the environmental problem at hand. It can also help to get stakeholders more involved in the project during the implementation step. Additionally, it can help to review the project from a different perspective and, thus, ensure the quality of the project.
Involving stakeholders may be more important in some projects than in others. Give an example of a project where you would advise to consult stakeholders (and why), and an example of a project where you think stakeholder involvement is not necessary.
I would advise consulting a stakeholder in a project where the problem is completely unstructured. And consulting a stakeholder is maybe not needed that much if the problem is fully structured.
What is the difference between stakeholder analysis and stakeholder engagement?
Analysis is identifying and prioritising stakeholders; investigating their interests, relationships and power. Stakeholder engagement is talking and involving stakeholders in the research
Which role can stakeholders play in the different steps of the Flex step approach? How are stakeholder analysis and stakeholder engagement related to the flex step approach?
All 3 steps of the Flex step method.
During the lecture two videos with examples of stakeholder engagement are shown, (i) Mapping air pollution in Mukuru, Nairobi; and (ii) Stakeholder engagement in IPBES. What are the differences and what are the similarities between the involvement of stakeholders in these two projects?
Differences:
In Kenia they involved a lot of non-experts, whereas in IPBES there were mostly experts.
In Kenia the idea was to empower lay people
Similarities:
In both cases it was co-creation of the knowledge
What are stakeholders?
- Persons or groups that have, or claim, ownership, rights, or interests in a ( decision making process) and its activities, past, present, or future.
What is a stakeholder analysis?
- A process that:
- defines aspects of a social and natural phenomenon affected by a decision or action
- identifies individuals, groups, and organisations who are affected by or can affect those parts of the phenomenon
- prioritises these individuals and groups for involvement in the decision-making process
What are the steps in stakeholder analysis?
- Identifying stakeholders
- Differentiating between and categorising stakeholders
- Investigating relationships between stakeholders
Why is stakeholder analysis relevant?
- Normative analysis:
- Assumption that people have the right to be involved in decision making
- To legitimise decisions made, through the involvement of key stakeholders
- Instrumental analysis:
- Pragmatic understanding of how decision makers can explain and manage stakeholders
- To overcome problems of adoption of new technologies/ decisions
What are the methods in identifying stakeholders and their stakes (Step 1)?
- Expert opinions, focus groups, semi-structured interviews, snow-ball sampling, checklist of likely stakeholder categories
- Iterative process!
What are the difficulties in identifying stakeholders and their stakes?
- Challenging to include all relevant stakeholders. A well-founded criteria should be used depending on the focus of the analysis
What are the ways of differentiating & categorising (Step 2)?
- Top-down analytical approaches:
- Done by the analyst and based on theoretical perspective of how system functions
- using e.g. interest-influence matrices
- identifying “key players”, “context setters”, “subjects”, “crowd”
- Bottom-up stakeholder-led categorisation:
- Based on empirical analysis of stakeholder perceptions ( i.e. doing interviews)
What are the ways to investigate stakeholder relationships?
- Actor-linkage matrices: creating grid indicating relationships among stakeholders with key-words such as conflict, complementary, cooperation
- Social network analysis: provides more in-depth insights into patterns of communication and relationships
- Knowledge mapping: analysing the content of information
Why stakeholder engagement?
- Access to different types of knowledge among stakeholders
- Account for different perspectives and values
- Get better insight in the nature and structure of the problem
- Ensure quality of the project, reviewed from different perspectives
- Have access to creative problem-solving capacity of group
- Ensure results are useful to users
- Get user commitment to results
- Democratisation: enable participants to be involved/ create options
- Reach consensus - define one option or decision
What do sustainable solutions for unstructured problems require?
- Systems knowledge: understanding of social ecological systems
- Normative (target) knowledge: judgements of how a system ought to be; desired state
- Transformative knowledge: needed to develop strategies towards societal strategies
