| The identification of a project's key stakeholders, an assessment of their interests and the ways in which those interests affect project riskiness and viability. A basic premise behind stakeholder analysis is that different groups have different concerns, capacities and interests, and that these need to be explicitly understood and recognized in the process of problem identification, objective setting and strategy selection. The key questions asked by stakeholder analysis are "Whose problems or opportunities are being analyzed" and "Who will benefit or loose-out, and how, from a proposed project intervention"? The ultimate aim being to help maximize the social, economic and institutional benefits of a project to target groups and ultimate beneficiaries, and to minimze its potential negative impacts, including staheholder conflicts. A stakeholder analysis develops a strategic view of the social environment in which a project will be implemented, thus it is usually the first step in building the relationships needed for the success of a project. A stakeholder analysis can be undertaken throughout all the stages of a project cycle. It can be used to:
- Identify and define the characteristics of key stakeholders;
- Draw out the interests of stakeholders in relation to the problems that the project is seeking to address;
- Identify conflicts of interests between stakeholders;
- Help to identify relations between stakeholders that may enable "coalitions" of project sponsorship, ownership and cooperation;
- Assess the capacity of different stakeholders and stakeholder groups to participate;
The main steps involved in stakeholder analysis are:
- Identification of the general development problem or opportunity being addressed and/or considered;
- Identification of all those groups who have a significant interest in the project;
- Investigation of roles, different interests, relative power and capacity to participate;
- Identifiation of the extent of cooperation or conflict in the relationship between stakeholders; and
- Interpretation of the findings of the analysis and incorporate relevant information into project design to help ensure that resources are appropriately targeted to meet objectives and needs of priority groups; management and coordination arrangements are appropriate to promote stakeholder ownership and participation; conflicts of stakeholders interest are recognized and explicitly addressed in project design.
In development projects, a key purpose of stakeholders analysis is to understand and address distributional concerns, particularly in the constext of effectively the needs of vulnerable groups. ref> www.landcareresearch.co.nz, www.panda.org (23 July 2008); Aid Delivery Methods - Project Cycle Management Guidelines, European Commission, 2004 </ref> |
STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS