The success of your project doesn’t depend on you. At least not entirely. You need to engage others to get it done and think strategically about who gets involved and how. This blog shares a practical guide to do a stakeholder analysis in the public sector.
What is a stakeholder analysis?
As you already know, implementing projects in the public sector is not easy! Even if the technical and administrative capacities to implement projects exist. If there are groups with enough bargaining power uninterested in following through with implementation, projects can fail.
A stakeholder analysis, also known as stakeholder mapping, is a tool to help you think systematically about the people or organizations that could impact a project. It could be due to their influential power or their authority, formal and informal. Understanding their interests and power could help you anticipate potential outcomes of your project and develop strategies to increase the likelihood of success.
While in real life, you won’t necessarily sit and map out your actors like this, understanding this process will help you identify some principles and considerations that will be useful.
Types of stakeholders
Stakeholders can be classified as:
- Primary stakeholders: those directly affected by the project;
- Secondary stakeholders: actors whose involvement is only indirect or temporary;
- Key stakeholders: actors that can use their voice, skills, knowledge, or position of power to significantly exercise influence over a reform; and
- veto power: those key stakeholders without whose support and participation the desired results cannot be achieved.
A step-by-step guide to stakeholder mapping
This is a step-by-step process you can follow.
- Define the scope of the stakeholder mapping: Identify clearly the issue at stake. Define a suitable time to do the mapping and the conditions under which an update will be required. Remember, policies and projects are dynamic, and so are the people involved in them.
- Identify the list of all the potential stakeholders. Consider, for example, direct beneficiaries, people with particular interests in the success (or failure) of a project, and people possibly affected by the reform. For inspiration, you could think of past projects and those who had influenced them.
- Value your stakeholders. For each of the stakeholders you identified in step 2, try to classify them on a scale from 1 to 10 in two categories:
- their interest in the reform. In other words, how important is the reform to them? (We will do that on the X-axis)
- their power to affect the reform. This measures the influence they have over the project or policy, and to what degree they can help achieve, or block, the desired change. (Use the Y-axis)
You could use a matrix similar to the one in Figure 1 to map all your stakeholders.
4. Categorize the stakeholders: Once you’ve mapped the stakeholders, you could classify them into four groups. Those with:
- high power and a strong interest in the project are the people or organizations it is important to fully engage and bring on board;
- low power but high interest is the group that needs to be kept informed. They have the potential, if organized, to form the basis of an interest group or coalition that could lobby for change;
- high power but low interest should be kept satisfied and ideally brought around as supporters for the proposed policy change; and
- low power and low interest are the groups to be monitored. As the dynamics of the relationship change and the project evolves, this group could gain relevance to the project.
Figure 1: Matrix for Stakeholder Analysis
5. Identify key stakeholders and assess the importance of these stakeholders for the reform or project. You can expand on the previous analysis by:
a. Identifying how relevant certain actors are to the project. Graphically, this can be measured by the size of the circle in Figure 2.
b. Identify their position towards the issue with colors: green if they are supporters of the policy, yellow if their position is neutral, and red if they are against the project.
Figure 2: Example of the matrix for stakeholders mapping
6. Design strategies to engage and influence stakeholders. Once you’ve identified the key stakeholders, it’s time to put together your action plan.
a.Key messages: Craft key messages to facilitate communication. While the core message is the same for all, you can highlight different aspects of the reform depending on each stakeholder.
For example, the Ministry of Finance would be concerned about the financial impact of a project, while the potential beneficiaries would focus on the benefits of that project.
b. Anticipate responses for key actors. Thinking ahead of time could help engage them in a discussion and facilitate an agreement.
If you want more tips on this, don’t miss next week’s blog about negotiation principles and register for our upcoming workshop on how to influence a decision-maker.
Next steps
In the public sector, you need to work with others. The stakeholder mapping is a practical tool to identify the key actors involved in a project, their interests and their power. Doing it will help you craft your implementation strategy and anticipate problems. Even if you don’t follow the step-by-step guide, being aware of these elements will be highly beneficial for the success of your project and your career.
