The Stakeholder Engagement Manual Volume 2 - AccountAbility

P8: UNDERSTANDING AND LEARNING ABOUT STAKEHOLDERS AND THEIR REPRESENTATIVES
BACKGROUND
In order to design stakeholder engagement processes that work, you need
a clear understanding of who your stakeholders are and how and why they
may want to engage with you.
In some cases you will need to engage directly with stakeholders themselves either
as a self-selected or statistically representative sample. In other cases you will
want to engage with stakeholders’ formal or informal representatives in the form
of opinion leaders, elected representatives, community leaders or advocacy or
membership organisations.
Th is section will introduce a more detailed assessment of stakeholders. It will also
include guidance on the selection of appropriate stakeholder representatives to
engage with.
Specifi cally important points to consider are the geographical scales at which
the stakeholder representatives operate and their relationship to the level at
which any outcomes may have to be implemented. For example, in engagements
regarding the global issue of climate change, many of the organisations
representing stakeholders’ viewpoints are themselves large global organisations,
who may not always have the necessary insights into the expectations of local
level stakeholders. In such cases, it is important to ensure that dialogues on
a more local level with local stakeholders are also undertaken which then
complement, feed into and verify the outputs of the global dialogue. 8
When learning more about stakeholder representatives, the following factors
should be considered:
8 See box 4.2, p.53 in Volume 1: “The Guide to Practitioners’ Perspectives on Stakeholder Engagement” for further clarifying examples.
STAGE 2
THE PRACTITIONER'S HANDBOOK ON STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT | 65