Identifying and engaging stakeholders – stakeholder analysis

A stakeholder is a person who has a vested interest in the outcome of your project. In other words, anyone affected by or anyone with influence on what you do.

There are many ways of identifying and categorising stakeholders, and what we present here is the approach we used. This is also a summary of what we did, and a longer explanation is given in the section on Dialogue with stakeholders in the AgriLink Living Lab Toolbox [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . If you are more deeply interested in stakeholding in agriculture then there is an even longer document Influence without Power: Stakeholder Management in Practice from an Agrilink partner, Wageningen University and Research.

First, we considered what is the most effective way of involving stakeholders and came up with four ways. There are many symptoms of disastrous meetings and they can be described in different ways, but our list of symptoms was:

Second, we thought about how stakeholders might behave and from the literature identified three main types – blockers, movers and floaters. There are many symptoms of disastrous meetings, and they can be described in different ways, but our list of symptoms was:

The strategy we devised to engage with stakeholders had the following elements:

One way to evaluate the potential impact of stakeholders on the Living Lab is to use a matrix of interest versus influence as shown in Figure 5.2 (a more practical version to use is in the Toolbox).

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Figure 5.2 An example of a stakeholder influence vs interest matrix

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An axis diagram. On the horizontal axis, the left-hand end says low influence on the project outcome. The right-hand end says high influence on the project outcome. On the vertical axis, the top says positive interest and the bottom says negative interest.

Figure 5.2 An example of a stakeholder influence vs interest matrix

Remember that influence is not necessarily about money or power but about commitment to the Living Lab in both the short and the long term. And interests can be positive, negative or even indifferent. The challenge is to create movement and momentum within stakeholders such that you increase the positive interests and reduce the negative interests.

Another way to capture your evaluation of stakeholders is to set out their interest and type of behaviour along with how you plan to handle them in a table like that shown in Table 5.1. Of course, that is not the only things you will have to plan.

We will discuss our experiences with engaging stakeholders in more detail in Session 7 on Dos and Don’ts.