Updated 2019 guide now available here.
For the original 2016 guide, continue reading...
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Researchers are increasingly expected by funders to identify and incorporate ‘beneficiaries’ into their work from the outset. Working out who might benefit from your work isn’t always easy though. Even if you do know who will benefit from your research, an equally important but often unasked question is: “who might be disadvantaged or lose out as a result of my research?” Even if you can answer both of these questions, there is another crucial question that every researcher should ask themselves: “who has the power to enable me to do my research and achieve impacts, and who has the power to block my work?”
It is just as important to identify individuals, organisations and groups who my be disadvantaged by the outcomes of your work, or who may block your research, as it is to know who your beneficiaries are, and who can help you. Knowing about potentially problematic stakeholders at the outset can give you the necessary time to adapt your research so that it no longer disadvantages those groups, or work out ways of ameliorating negative impacts before you run into opposition or achieve bitter-sweet impacts for one group at the expense of another.
What is a stakeholder?
A stakeholder is any person, organization or group that is affected by or who can affect a decision, action or issue. Rather than just identifying ‘beneficiaries’, a stakeholder analysis seeks to identify people, organisations or groups who may be either positively or negatively affected by your research. In addition to identifying those affected by your research, stakeholder analysis seeks to also identify those who might affect your ability to complete your research and generate impacts, either positively or negatively. These stakeholders might not directly benefit from or be negatively affected by your work, but they may have the power to enable or block your work from making a difference.
Why analyse your stakeholders?
It may seem self-evident that all the relevant stakeholders should be identified prior to any attempt to engage. However, it is surprising how often this step is omitted in research projects that need to work with stakeholders. In many cases this omission can significantly compromise the success of the research. For example, the project may miss crucial information that could have been provided, had they engaged with the right people.
In cases where very few stakeholders are identified or engaged with, this can lead to a lack of ownership of project goals, which can sometimes turn into opposition from certain stakeholders. In cases where a single important stakeholder has been omitted from the process, that organization or group may challenge the legitimacy of the work, and undermine the credibility of the wider project. Stakeholder analysis helps solve these problems by:
Identifying who has a stake in your work;
Categorising and prioritizing stakeholders you need to invest most time with; and
Identifying (and preparing you for) relationships between stakeholders (whether conflicts or alliances).
A successful stakeholder analysis will help you:
Start talking early to the right people, so that you can identify any major barriers to your work, and identify the people who can help you overcome those barriers. There is evidence that projects that engage with stakeholders early engender a greater sense of ownership amongst stakeholders, who are then more likely to engage throughout the lifetime of the project, and implement the recommendations of the work you have done together.
Know who you need to talk to: don’t just open your address book or talk to the ‘usual suspects’. Find out who might lose out, as well as who will benefit. Find out who is typically marginalized and left out, as well as the people and organisations that everyone knows and trusts. For example, Bec Colvin suggests drawing on methods from the arts to identify stakeholders using tacit knowledge or past experience. Those who are left out are usually the first to question and criticize work that they feel no ownership over.
Know what they’re interested in: you need to have a clear idea of the research issue at stake before you will be able to effectively identify stakeholders. But that doesn’t mean that the research questions and issues you explore together should be set in stone. As you begin to identify stakeholders, you will find out more about the nature of their stake in your research, and you may need to broaden your view of what is included in your work, if everyone is to feel that their interests are included.
Find out who’s got the most influence to help or hinder your work: some people, organisations or groups are more powerful than others. If there are highly influential stakeholders who are opposed to your project, then you need to know who they are, so that you can develop an influencing strategy to win their support. If they support your work, then it is also important to know who these stakeholders are, so you can join forces with them to work more effectively. There will be some influential stakeholders who have relatively little interest in your work. For example, they may have a broad remit that includes many issues that are more important and urgent to them than the specific focus of your research. Influential individuals are often busy and inaccessible, and you may need to spend significant time and energy getting their attention, before you are able to access their help.
Find out who is disempowered and marginalized: stakeholder analysis is often used to prioritise more influential stakeholders for engagement. Although time and resources may be limited, it is important not to use stakeholder analysis as a tool to further marginalize groups that are already disempowered and ignored. Many of these groups may have a significant interest in your research, but very little influence over the issues you are researching, and little capacity to help you achieve the impacts you want.
Identify key relationships so you avoid exacerbating conflicts and can create alliances that empower marginalized groups. It can be incredibly valuable to know in advance about conflicts between individuals, organizations or groups, so that you can avoid inflaming conflict and where possible resolve disputes. Through stakeholder analysis, it can sometimes become possible to create alliances between disempowered groups and those with more power, who share similar interests and goals, thereby empowering previously marginalized groups.
Methods for stakeholder analysis
Doing a proper stakeholder analysis doesn’t have to take a lot of time. We would recommend that you invite a small number of non-academics who know the stakeholder landscape well to help you with this task. But if you are short on time, then even if you just fill out the table below with your research team, you will be able to do far more impactful research than you would have done if you did not take this step.
The following methodology will take you approximately 2 days to complete, including between half a day and a day for an initial workshop, followed by a series of half hour telephone interviews to check your findings with key stakeholders (which is also a great opportunity to get their feedback on the focus of your research and start getting ownership as you adapt your work to stakeholder interests). The following steps are designed to be straight-forward and replicable, but this does not mean that they should be inflexibly applied. Local circumstances may require these steps to be adapted, to ensure that the stakeholder analysis is a tool that brings stakeholders together and facilitates active engagement in research.
1. Identify 2-4 cross-cutting stakeholders: Identify between 2-4 individuals from cross-cutting stakeholder organisations who operate at the scale of your research (if you have multiple study sites, you may need to do this for each site). The key criterion for selection is their breadth of interest in the issues you are researching, so that they are familiar with the widest possible range of organisations that might have a stake in your work. Aim to represent a range of different perspectives on the issue, so that you can facilitate debate about the relative interest and influence of different stakeholders (e.g. someone from a Government department or agency and someone from an NGO, not just people from different Government departments)
2. Invite cross-cutting stakeholders to half-day workshop: only 2-4 stakeholders plus project team should be present, as it is not the aim to represent all stakeholders at this workshop (this isn’t possible as we have yet to systematically identify them). This workshop should take approximately 4 hours (half a day), but if there is time, it is more relaxed to do this over a day:
Clearly establish the focus of the research that you think individuals, organisations or groups might have a stake in: it is important to be as specific as possible about your focus, so you can clearly identify who has a stake and who does not. You might want to consider the geographical or sectoral scope of the project (e.g. are you interested only in stakeholders at a local level, or is this a national issue that may involve national (or international) stakeholders? Which sectors of the economy or population are relevant to the research? A discussion about these sorts of questions at the start of the workshop should clarify any differing perceptions amongst the group, to avoid confusion later (approx. 15 mins);
Choose a well-known stakeholder organization and run through the stakeholder analysis for this organisation as an example. Draw copies of the extendable matrix below on flip chart paper and stick to walls, so that everyone can see what is being done. Explain that interest and influence can be both positive and negative (e.g. a group’s interests might be negatively affected and they may have influence to block as well as facilitate) (approx. 10 mins);
Ask participants to identify organisations, groups or individuals who are particularly interested and/or influential, and list them in the first column of the matrix at the bottom of this page. We've provided you with a blank table and a worked example to illustrate how this might look. Use the questions in the box below as prompts to help you identify as many stakeholders as possible (approx. 15 mins);
As a group work through each of the columns in the matrix, one stakeholder at a time, discussing the nature of their interest and reasons for their influence etc., and capturing the discussion as best as possible in the matrix (getting participants to capture points on post-it notes where necessary to avoid taking too long) (approx. 1-2 hours);
Take a break, and then invite participants to use the remaining time working individually to complete the columns for all the remaining stakeholders, adding rows for less interested and influential stakeholders as they go. Remind people to try and identify groups who might typically be marginalised or disadvantaged, but who still have strong interest in the research (approx. 1 hour);
Ask participants to check the work done by other participants, adding their own comments with post-it notes where they disagree or don’t understand (approx. 15 minutes);
Facilitate a discussion of key points people feel should be discussed as a group about stakeholders where there is particular disagreement or confusion and resolve these where possible (accepting differing views where it is not possible to resolve differences) (approx. 30 minutes);
Identify key individuals to check findings with after the workshop. Identify up to 5 individuals from particularly influential organisations, trying to get as wide a spread of different interests as possible (to do this, it may be necessary to start with a longer list and then identify people who are likely to provide similar views to reduce the length of the list). Finally consider if there are any particularly important stakeholders who have high levels of interest but low influence, who you do not want to marginalize and go through the same process, to arrive at a list of around 7-8 individuals who you can check the findings of the workshop with (approx. 20 mins).
3. Interview key individuals to check that no important stakeholders have been missed. Depending on the sensitivity of the material collected, you may only want to share the list of stakeholder organisations and their interests (not level of interest or anything else). For some of the individuals, it may be possible to check all columns in the matrix, but beware that some organisations may be upset that workshop participants perceive them to have low interest and/or influence. If the list of stakeholders from the workshop is sent in advance, these interviews should take no longer than 30 minutes each, and can be done by telephone.
4. Depending on how much the analysis changes from the workshop, you may want to check the amended version with workshop participants and make final tweaks.
5. Write-up: some columns can easily be converted into graphs, where there is numerical or categorical data involved. Consider carefully whether you want to all qualitative data to be made publically available in a form that is linked to specific named organisations and individuals, especially where this concerns conflicts between organisations. For a publically available version of the report, types of conflict may be summarized and the nature of stakes and types of influence may be summarized for different types of stakeholder, accompanied by graphs of numerical/categorical data e.g. farming organisations are most likely to be interested in certain aspects and have most influence over certain policy areas. The full stakeholder analysis matrix should be retained for use by the project team.
Images from a stakeholder analysis conducted for the UK Government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, February 2016
Do your own stakeholder analysis with this template
We've developed an editable template that will guide you through doing your own stakeholder analysis, based on Prof Reed's "extendable matrix" approach - see Reed et al. (2009) and Reed and Curzon (2015).
To give you a sense of what this can look like, you can view or download a worked example below, based on a hypothetical stakeholder analysis developed for a project funded by the Swedish International Development and Cooperation Agency (Sida), led by the Regional Environment Centre in cooperation with local partner IUCN ROWA. The Water SUM project, for which this was developed, is using this template to train country teams how to conduct a stakeholder analysis in preparation for local water security action planning in collaboration with stakeholders.
Click on the image above to view the full example
Alternatively, take a look at this stakeholder analysis we did for the UK Government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to identify stakeholders in honeybee health, which informed the development of their National Pollinator Strategy last year. This project was done over a year, and involved Social Network Analysis and the analysis of many in-depth interviews, but you can get what you need for most research projects over a couple of days, using the methods described above. You can see the sort of thing that is possible with an in-depth stakeholder analysis like this in this presentation.
The template above is based on the template used in Fast Track Impact training. Both templates have columns that rate and then characterise the nature of people’s interest and their influence over the research and its impact. You can adapt the columns in this matrix to fit with your own purpose, bearing in mind that the more columns you add, the longer your workshop will take.
Thanks to WaterSUM project (www.watersum.rec.org) implemented by the Regional Environmental Center (www.rec.org) for funding that led to the production of this blog.
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