Community guidelines for accessing forestry voluntary carbon ... - FAO

Chapter 5: Project implementation: field work
mapping process begins by identification of a few broad categories of
stakeholder (e.g. government agencies, civil society, local communities,
private sector). This helps to ensure that all potential stakeholders are
identified. As a rule, it is better to assume that a particular group is a
relevant stakeholder than to rule them out before thorough checks have
been carried out.
All stakeholders affected by, or interested in, the project should be
assigned to a particular category. For each specific stakeholder, the
project developer should identify the level of influence over success
of the project, as compared to other stakeholders, the level of interest
in the project and the priority issues for each of these groups. This
is important in order to decide what is the appropriate engagement
strategy for each stakeholder.
Stakeholder consultation should be integrated throughout the whole
project management cycle. It is not cheap or easy. However, it can
both increase benefits and reduce risk in the long run. Moreover, by
ensuring that all local stakeholders have been effectively included in the
development of the project, the risk of facing conflict at a later stage is
reduced.
Local stakeholders can be an important source of knowledge,
information, and labour for activities including participatory mapping,
impact assessment and inventory. Other stakeholders, such as NGOs
and government agencies, may also be important sources of knowledge.
The stakeholder consultation process provides an opportunity to identify
how each stakeholder can contribute to the project, their motivation
for doing so and how to ensure support for the project. However, the
project developer should always bear in mind that each stakeholder
group will have concerns about project design or implementation and
will want reassurance, through the consultation process, that the project
appreciates these concerns and makes efforts to address them. Figure
14 summarizes some common stakeholder categories, priority issues
and engagement strategies.
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