How to engage stakeholders

1. How to engage stakeholders

2. There are three things to consider: Stakeholders - a person or organization with an interest in the Coastal Zone of the SSA, where ‘interest’ refers not only to an intellectual concern but also to anything that has, or might have, an effect on the actual or perceived well-being of the person or organization. Who are these people? How can they be categorised?

3. Stakeholder engagement - any process of gaining information from, consulting with, or working with, stakeholders or the representatives of stakeholder groups. • What are the patterns of interaction between stakeholders? • How can interventions be implemented? • How to include in policy-making? • How to identify conflict and competition?

4. Stakeholder mapping - a subset of institutional mapping that involves the identification of stakeholder groups relevant to a particular matter, such as a Human Activity, impact, public environmental policy, or Policy Issue. • What are the roles stakeholders play? • How can discussions be managed? • Are issues, impacts and consequences correct?

5. Stakeholders cover many scales, gradients and variety.

6. Stakeholders are spread out over a large area and may be close, far, intimately or superficially linked to issues. • Stakeholder engagement is designed to identify: • Who are the current and future stakeholders • Which should participate? • What organisations to include? • Relation of stakeholders to each other and the issue. • What type of behaviour can be expected and why? • What strategies are likely to succeed to meet goals?

7. Output of stakeholder engagement is a map of the underlying issues and conflicts associated with coastal governance. • The process will inform you on how to structure and design a consensus-building, collaborative process for: • - Stakeholder identification. • Issues for inclusion or non-inclusion. • Sequencing of negotiations of these issues. • - Format and frequency of meetings, sub-committee meetings, communications and types of technical and facilitation expertise.

8. The desired outcome of stakeholder mapping is to have the right persons at the right place talking about the right things in the right ways.

9. How do you engage currently with stakeholders? • Does it achieve understanding of: • The relationships between and amongst stakeholders? • Their interests and positions with regard to the various policy issues their coastal zone is facing? • Areas of agreement and disagreement? • Does it lead to recommendations for process designed to arrive at a successful and implementable ICZM governance regime?

10. The SPICOSA stakeholder engagement process? Six stages: Identifying the “end-user-group” and organizing a meeting for them. The end-user group meeting. Identifying and inviting the stakeholder survey participants. The focus group and interview frameworks, conducting the data collection process. Analysing the data. Communicating and utilising the results.

11. Stage 1: Identifying the “end-user-group” and organizing a meeting for them. • Use the project outputs. • People from; existing organisations, power relationships, territorial use, users burdening carrying capacity. • Maximum of 12. • Instrumental in advancing ICZM initiative. • Identify a typology of human activities.

12. Stage 2: The end-user group meeting. • Identify human coastal-marine activities in SSA. • Identify stakeholders according to activities. • Against typology. • Against organisation affiliation (public body, private sector, civil society, unorganised interest). • Short list of policy issues and a determination of “the key issue”.

13. Stage 3: Identifying and inviting the stakeholder survey participants. • Select survey participants (may include some in EUG). • Design survey structure. • Interviews. • Focus groups. • Combination of above. • Designing and confirming a focus group and interview framework. • Focus groups - stakeholders from same or complimentary activities. • A neutral facilitator/interviewer should be identified (not EUG). • A focus-group note-taker should identified (not necessarily neutral). • The interview and focus group framework of questions should be confirmed and validated.

14. Stage 4: The focus group and interview design and the data collection process. • Framework hierarchy. • The central research question/s of the survey. • Who are the stakeholders? • What are the policy issues – is there one KEY issue? • The broad primary questions asked to elicit the above. • The secondary questions associated with the 1o question to draw out detail. • Collecting data for each issue • A hierarchy of questions. • Questions framed to identify 4 of the 6 characteristics of CATWOE.

15. Stage 4: CATWOE – mnemonic of 6 characters needed to explore functional relationship between stakeholders for an issue. C = Customers stakeholders affected by a transformation but not its control. A = Actors carry out transformations (policy & decision makers). T = Transformations conversion of input to output to change a system (policy to alter behaviour). W = Weltanschauunghworldview giving context/justification to T (future scenario of policy). 0 = Owners stakeholders with power ad influence to facilitate or block T. E = Environment features outside of human system.

16. Stage 5: Analysing the results. • For each stakeholder group: • Key issues and how they have arisen. • Basic interests and how they have developed. • Future discussion and information sources regarding judgements. • Proposed solutions. • Amenity to compromise, or not. • Barriers to negotiation, mediation, consensus-based, deliberative decision making approaches. • Reflect different view points on same issues. • Which stakeholders have influence on which issue.

17. Stage 6: Communicating and utilising the results. • Feed and partially structure discussion on policy issues. • Matrix of issues of major and paramount importance to different stakeholders. • Identification of issues of minor or no importance to different stakeholders.