Stakeholder Analysis

The previous chapters on stakeholder theory, stakeholder engagement and communicative planning have shown that stakeholders are important to any decision-making and planning process. This is particularly true for contentious projects where significant problems demand solutions, yet where stakeholders are not satisfied with their options by working alone, and where acceptable solutions are not emerging from traditional decision-making processes (Booher and Innes 2002). These problems often coincide with a complex social, economic and environmental setting. Such contentious projects attract large numbers of stakeholders, each with different backgrounds, perspectives, and objectives (Crocker 2007). This leads to a complex set of stakeholders holding many different positions with respect to the problem itself, and with respect to other stakeholders. A simple polarized dichotomy of for and against does not, as a consequence, exist in these contexts. This complicates the analysis and, subsequently, the classification and categorization of the stakeholders (Ashworth and Skelcher 2005; Achterkamp and Vos 2007; Greenwood 2007). The question thus becomes: how can these stakeholders be differentiated from each other and different attention be given to different stakeholders? In other words, how can the stakeholders be analysed to understand the uniqueness of each stakeholder. By examining the available literature on the topic, three main components that define a stakeholder will be identified: stakeholder salience, stakeholder interests, and stakeholder relations with each other.