2.3. Resources for deciding which stakeholders to engage
Sep 19th, 2007 by leb3
Deciding who to engage in measuring and assessing landscape performance, and to what extent, is key to a successful outcome. In most multifunctional landscape assessment initiatives, virtually everyone is a stakeholder to some degree. To help sort out who to involve begin by considering the following three categories of people and organizations and plan to include all of them:
- Those whose cooperation is essential to reaching your goals,
- Those who are in positions to prevent you from reaching your goals,
- Those who will be affected as you make progress toward your goals.
Yellow Wood Associates (2007) has developed simple worksheets for identifying stakeholders, which have been adapted for the LM approach. As you begin to identify concrete goals and criteria for the performance of your landscape use the worksheets to identify stakeholders who are associated with each of them.
Stakeholder analysis in natural resource management is a methodology for deciding who has a stake in a natural resource issue, or in a region where natural resources play an important role in the lives of the people who live there. It is useful to become familiar with these guidelines for stakeholder analysis.
There are likely to be multiple groups of stakeholders, and some with sharply competing interests. In this situation it is important to be familiar with strategies for managing multi-stakeholder processes (MSP). Resources on MSP may be found here.
Institutional mapping is one concrete way to gain insight into which stakeholders to include, and which may be missing from a viable landscape assessment process. Institutional mapping involves identifying groups and organizations who are present in a landscape in order to assess the potential for coordinated landscape management. A useful tool for institutional mapping is available by clicking here.
Continue to Unit 3: Goals & Criteria
