Stakeholder Analysis

Graduate School Seminar Series: Collaborative Leadership & Grand Challenges Research

If you want to help solve the world’s problems of almost any size you had better know something about stakeholder analysis. Stakeholders may be defined as any person, group or organization involved in or affected by an issue. The number of stakeholders involved or affected by any specific problem may vary greatly. Understanding who these stakeholders are (and especially who the key stakeholders are) and what matters to them is crucial to understanding how best to define those problems in the first place. In order to make real progress, participants in a change effort must define problems in a way that leads to technically workable and desirable solutions. These solutions also must be politically acceptable, administratively feasible, and legally, ethically and morally defensible. In other words, simply coming up with a technically good answer to some challenging problem is not enough. If you can’t also come up with a coalition of interested stakeholders large enough and strong enough to adopt that solution and protect it during implementation, you just have the equivalent of the average New Year’s resolution. Nice idea, but it won’t happen! Stakeholder analysis is one important component of making sure that the whole process of change stands a chance of actually succeeding.

This seminar will introduce participants to the array of stakeholder analyses that are useful for: problem formulation and solution search; building a winning coalition around proposal development, review and adoption; and implementing, monitoring, and evaluating strategic interventions. Participants will practice using some of these techniques.

Presenter:

John M. Bryson, McKnight Presidential Professor of Planning and Public Affairs, Humphrey School of Public Affairs