Stakeholder Strategy Plan

A stakeholder strategy plan can guide one on how to interact, communicate and involve with each identified stakeholder during different phases of a project. The stakeholder strategy provides approaches for building and maintaining positive relationships with stakeholders. It also helps you to define who should participate, in what ways and at what stage of the project cycle stakeholders should be involved. This will contribute to realise a well-designed project and to be successful with your initiative!

(Adapted from ELLIOT 2003)

• Best approaches to involve stakeholders in key decision
• Ways to meet stakeholders’ expectations
• Ways to create buy-in and ownership
• Ways to use the influence of stakeholders to the project’s advantage
• Bests methods for communicating with stakeholders
• Ways to neutralize or eliminate negative impact of stakeholders

In the previous steps, you gained a lot of information about the stakeholders. Now, the aim of a stakeholder strategy plan is to use this information and to convert it into a preliminary strategy plan showing HOW to involve the identified stakeholders and WHEN (at which stage) to involve them to help the project to succeed. The stakeholder participation matrix is an effective way to convert the existing information into an overview of stakeholder participation.

The stakeholder participation matrix contains two axes: The horizontal axe (rows) is about the participation level, and the vertical axe (columns) is about implementation level:

Participation can be seen as a continuous scale, or continuum, ranging from a low level of stakeholder participation to a high level of participation. It depends on how interested the stakeholders are (e.g., in regards to what they hope to get out of the project), and also on how much participation YOU want to involve them (WATER AND FORESTRY 2005). There are the four (general) levels:

• Inform: To provide the stakeholder(s) with balanced and objective information to enable people to understand the problem, alternatives and/or solution.
• Consult: To obtain stakeholder feedback on analysis, alternatives and/or decisions. It involves acknowledging concerns and providing feedback on how stakeholder input has influenced the decision.
• Collaborate/Partnership: To work as a partner with the stakeholder(s) on each aspect of the decision, including the development of alternatives and the identification of the preferred solution.
• Empower/Control: A process of capacitating the stakeholder(s) through involvement and collaboration so that they are able to make informed decisions and to take responsibility for final decision-making.

In each of the cells, write which stakeholders you need to inform, to consult, with which you want to collaborate, and which are controlling the process.

(Adapted from WATER AND FORESTRY 2005)

This level helps to identify which stakeholders are involved in which stage of the project, e.g. during the exploring phase the planning phase, the implementation phase and the monitoring and evaluation phase.

The below table is adapted from ODA 1995. It presents a project in Pakistan about the collection and growing of medicinal plants in a rural region. Important stakeholders are e.g. the Islamic clergy, Pharmaceutical companies as the buyers of the plants, women’s groups (who collect them), the Ministry of Population and Welfare, and local Health NGO. The table shows which stakeholders are involved at which stage, and how much they participate in the project.

<----- Go back to Step 3: stakeholder interests

Or see also:

-----> Step 1: Stakeholder identification

-----> Step 2: Stakeholder importance and influence