Stakeholder Analysis

This can be achieved through consultations involving the full range of local participants. Identifying in the very beginning of a project those people, groups, departments and institutions who have a legitimate interest and can potentially contribute to developing and implementing a project is essential for success. As Integrated Urban Governance has a vertical and a horizontal dimension as well as a dimension beyond administrative boundaries, stakeholders must be identified across these different dimensions.

Stakeholder identification

Questions to identify stakeholders in the public sector

Horizontal dimension (on the level of a municipality, a district administration)

• Which other departments and disciplines are affected by potential measures?
• Which other departments and disciplines can potentially contribute to the project?
• Which policies, which political commissions, committees or councils are affected?
• Vertical dimension (other tiers of governments)
• Is a government / an administrative body on a different level (region or district for instance) affected? Which departments at this level are affected?
• Can other government levels potentially contribute to a project?
• Are there legal regulations or mutual agreements requiring that other levels must be involved?
• Beyond administrative boundaries (other municipalities; private and business sector, civil society and social and community sector)
• Are other municipalities affected or can they potentially contribute to a project?
• Which stakeholders and stakeholder groups / representatives outside the public sector are affected?
• Which stakeholders and stakeholder groups / representatives outside the public sector can contribute to a project?

Potential stakeholders in the non-public sector

• individual people in an affected community or neighbourhood,
• spokespersons of a community,
• citizens' action groups and NGOs,
• non-profit associations and societies,
• commercial and business umbrella organisations,
• companies and firms.

Questions to identify stakeholders in the non-public sector

The following questions can help to decide whether there is a potential contribution to the development of a project and the implementation of measures:

• To whose benefit will the potential outcomes of a project be?
• Which interests exist? Do these interests suggest the project will be welcomed/supported or will there be opposition/resistance?
• What information, knowledge and expertise is needed? Who has it?
• What other resources (financial or in-kind) are needed? Who has it?
• Whose decision/ approval is needed?
• Are there legal requirements for the inclusion of specific stakeholders?

In many cases it is not sensible to include all potential stakeholders into the development or implementation phase of a project. On the basis of the questions mentioned above, the following matrix can be a tool for making a decision as to who needs to be included:

Influence-Interest-Matrix

UN-Habitat (2001): Tools to Support Participatory Urban Decision Making. Nairobi, p. 24; supplemented by the author

The initial stakeholder analysis does not lead to results that are carved in stone. In many cases there will be a need to include additional stakeholders in the course of a project while others retreat. The basic principles and decision making tools for stakeholder inclusion, however, are relevant in a later phase of the project as well.

An adequate project management needs to ensure balanced representation and that all relevant stakeholders are included. Relevance, however, refers not only to the questions mentioned above, it refers also to gender and social justice. There are, for instance, social groups and members of these groups whose power and ability to formulate their interests is constrained. Including them is certainly a task of good governance.

Stakeholder and residents' mobilisation

Mobilising the general public in deprived areas is often a very challenging task. Generally speaking classic-type public participation procedures reach those residents groups who have a special connection to the area or those who are dependent in a particular degree on capacity to function and quality of living locations. These are for example socially stable families with young children or those who are active in citizens' action groups or committees. In disadvantaged neighbourhoods, high levels of fluctuation, frustration about one's own situation, distrust of 'politics' or politicians and a proportion of residents who have, due to personal problems, retreated into an 'inward isolation', make activating residents to assume responsibility more difficult.

Stakeholder mobilisation needs communication

Right at the outset the potential advantages and the anticipated outcomes of a project need to be communicated, opportunities for residents to influence development need to be made clear. Often it is a good idea here to include well-known and accepted figures in the community. In some instances small financial rewards have been made available as encouragement to become involved in the project.

Stakeholder mobilisation needs patience

Frequently it will not be possible right at the beginning to include all the relevant stakeholders. That is why during the course of the project too not only the outcomes and interim results, but also difficulties arising, need to be communicated. Often some groups can be reached after some time has elapsed, when the first positive project results can be seen, fears of getting into contact can be appeased and it has become evident that residents really can exert some influence.

Stakeholder mobilisation needs transparency

Motives and reasons for a project and for individual decisions in the course of the project need to be quite evident and comprehensible. Hardly anything is more damaging than an impression that a project in actual fact is (in addition) serving different purposes other than those which have been postulated, that specific interests of individual groups are being served and this is contrary to one's own interests.