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Participation process in FUSE – Stakeholder Analysis

Raphael Karutz, Hannes Grohs, Joni Dib

Stakeholder involvement is playing an important role in the FUSE project. At the core of the participation process are the Sustainability Living Labs (SLLs), in which a diverse group of stakeholders engages via workshops and remote communications/social media throughout the project duration. The strong focus on stakeholder participation is motivated a) by the need for a good understanding of living conditions etc. for the modeling of agent behavior and b) by the understanding that an increased collaboration within and between key organizations of the (urban) FWE nexus is critical for tackling nested problems. Bringing a diverse group of stakeholders in the same room in our workshop can contribute to that end. At the same time, the different backgrounds, hierarchical levels and viewpoints pose challenges for the process and require a careful selection of the participants. Recent literature regarding participatory natural resource management research provides insights into how and why stakeholder analysis (SHA) should be conducted (Reed et al., 2009). FUSE’s stakeholder analysis builds on this, taking a three-step approach: 1. Identification of relevant institutions, 2. mapping of their relationship to the topics in terms of interest and influence and 3. Analysis of their relevance for the project and selection of group. All three steps were done collaboratively between the project team and local partner institutions.

Three-step process

1. Identification

The identification of potentially relevant stakeholders followed an iterative process, starting with desk research on public institutions in the FWE nexus and urban arena, as well as major private, research and non-governmental organizations. Since such initial searches are always prone to biases towards identifying the ‘usual suspects’, consultation of the local partners was sought and snowballing procedures (asking SHs about other actors in the field) were followed. From an operational project perspective, the aim was to find a modus operandi that reflected normative considerations – achieving an inclusive view on stakeholders also giving a voice to the ‘nominally powerless’ (Bryson, 2004; Reed et al., 2009) – and was still manageable within the scope of the project.

2. Mapping

The second step comprises the differentiation and categorization of stakeholders. Within the project, we extend the widely used interest-influence matrix (see Fig. 1). The matrix maps stakeholders according to their level of interest in the topic (or their affectedness) and their level of power to influence the decision-making process. Consequently, stakeholders are grouped into “Key players” (high interest and influence), “Context setters” (high influence – little interest), “Subjects” (little influence – high interest) and “Crowd” (little influence and interest) (Reed et al., 2009). For the urban FWE nexus, typical key players are public institutions on national and local levels, such as ministries, city administration or utilities. Context setters may be regulatory authorities, but also media and in certain cases research institutions. Subjects are affected end users such as urban (especially slum) residents, small businesses, farmers etc. The crowd are all other stakeholder groups that are not particularly affected by FWE nexus issues and do not play a major role in the decision-making.

Figure 1: Matrix used for mapping and selection of stakeholders for FUSE's SLLs

 

3.    Selection

In order to derive a manageable group of stakeholders for the SLLs, the extensive list of stakeholders prepared in the previous steps was restructured according to the relevance of the respective stakeholders in the concrete context. Naturally, key stakeholders, subjects and context setters were among the high-relevance stakeholders.
Eventually, the most relevant stakeholders were sorted into two heterogeneous but distinguishable groups: affected resource users (households, small businesses, farmers, slum inhabitants and representatives of NGOs), and experts and decision-makers from (public institutions, industry, and NGOs). These two groups correspond to the first set of SLL workshops conducted in Amman and Pune in early 2019, where the user workshop was intended to yield information on the living conditions, the most pressing challenges and coping strategies of the resource users, while the expert workshop focused on the development of future visions and solutions for these challenges.

References

  • Bryson, J. M. (2004). What to do when Stakeholders matter. Public Management Review, 6(1), 21–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719030410001675722
  • Reed, M. S., Graves, A., Dandy, N., Posthumus, H., Hubacek, K., Morris, J., . . . Stringer, L. C. (2009). Who's in and why? A typology of stakeholder analysis methods for natural resource management. Journal of Environmental Management, 90(5), 1933–1949. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2009.01.00