Stakeholder engagement in water governance as social learning: lessons from practice

The OECD Principles on Water Governance set out various requirements for stakeholder engagement. Coupled with conceptualizations of social learning, this article asks how we define and enact stakeholder engagement and explores the actual practice of engagement of stakeholders in three fields of water governance. The results suggest that a key consideration is the purpose of the stakeholder engagement, requiring consideration of its ethics, process, roles and expected outcomes. While facilitators cannot be held accountable if stakeholder engagement ‘fails’ in terms of social learning, they are responsible for ensuring that the enabling conditions for social learning are met

Sustainability Standards and Stakeholder Engagement: Lessons From Carbon Markets

Stakeholders play an increasingly active role in private governance, including development of standards for measuring sustainability. Building on prior studies focused on standards and stakeholder engagement, we use an innovation management theoretical lens to compare stakeholder engagement and standards developed in two carbon markets: the Climate Action Reserve and the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism. We develop and test hypotheses regarding how different processes of stakeholder engagement in standard development affect the number, identity, and age of stakeholders involved, as well as the variation and quality of the resulting standards. In doing so, we contribute to the growing literature on stakeholder engagement in developing sustainability standards

Stakeholder engagement as a facilitator of organizational learning

This paper examines the relationship between stakeholder engagement and competence building. Following the dual perspective of the firm, which indicated that managers deal with both transactions and competences concurrently, we argue that stakeholder interactions also concern both transaction cost reduction and value creation. Based on a review of the extant literature, we incorporated a micro-macro connection between organizational learning and competence building. Further to this, we developed a conceptual framework by linking stakeholder engagement and organizational learning. This framework demonstrates that stakeholder relations may have significant effects on organizational learning and thus stakeholder engagement can play the role of facilitator in building firm competences

Protocol for the development of guidance for stakeholder engagement in health and healthcare guideline development and implementation

Stakeholder engagement has become widely accepted as a necessary component of guideline development and implementation. While frameworks for developing guidelines express the need for those potentially affected by guideline recommendations to be involved in their development, there is a lack of consensus on how this should be done in practice. Further, there is a lack of guidance on how to equitably and meaningfully engage multiple stakeholders. We aim to develop guidance for the meaningful and equitable engagement of multiple stakeholders in guideline development and implementation. METHODS: This will be a multi-stage project. The first stage is to conduct a series of four systematic reviews. These will (1) describe existing guidance and methods for stakeholder engagement in guideline development and implementation, (2) characterize barriers and facilitators to stakeholder engagement in guideline development and implementation, (3) explore the impact of stakeholder engagement on guideline development and implementation, and (4) identify issues related to conflicts of interest when engaging multiple stakeholders in guideline development and implementation. DISCUSSION: We will collaborate with our multiple and diverse stakeholders to develop guidance for multi-stakeholder engagement in guideline development and implementation. We will use the results of the systematic reviews to develop a candidate list of draft guidance recommendations and will seek broad feedback on the draft guidance via an online survey of guideline developers and external stakeholders. An invited group of representatives from all stakeholder groups will discuss the results of the survey at a consensus meeting which will inform the development of the final guidance papers. Our overall goal is to improve the development of guidelines through meaningful and equitable multi-stakeholder engagement, and subsequently to improve health outcomes and reduce inequities in health

Maximizing stakeholders' interests: An empirical analysis of the stakeholder approach to corporate governance

The purpose of this paper is to build on the emerging stakeholder model of corporate governance by analyzing the CSR function at board level, board diversity, and stakeholder engagement, and how it relates to financial performance. Based on an empirical study of an international sample of large companies, we find board responsibility for CSR to be a key factor in promoting engagement with primary and secondary stakeholders of the firm. Depending on the legal tradition of the country in which the company is based, we find evidence that board diversity and stakeholder engagement are positively correlated with firm financial performance.Corporate governance; corporate social responsibility; board diversity; stakeholder engagement; firm performance;

Stakeholder engagement: Defining strategic advantage for sustainable construction

This is the accepted version of the following article: Rodriguez-Melo, A. and Mansouri, S. A. (2011), Stakeholder Engagement: Defining Strategic Advantage for Sustainable Construction. Bus. Strat. Env., 20: 539–552, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bse.715/abstract.Although sustainable development is increasingly becoming a part of business plans, it is unclear what makes the economic, social and environmental dynamics strategically compatible. This research examines which of the following in sustainable development – government policy, managerial attitude and stakeholder engagement – is the most influential on the profitability of companies in the UK construction sector. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were rendered through a survey and semi-structured interviews. Patterns of ambiguity in legislation were discovered as an obstacle for changing the sector's mind-set. Stakeholder engagement was identified as the defining factor increasing managers' awareness, helping legislation to be effectively implemented and making sustainability highly appealing to clients. These findings indicate that to gain competitive advantage, companies should embark on long-term strategic alliances which adopt the proposals of environmental non-governmental organisations and closely follow public opinion. This, strengthens brand equity, allows for premium pricing, increases market share and maximizes profit

Non-profit organisations and stakeholder relationships : assessing digital communication through public relations theory : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Communication in Public Relations at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

This research examines New Zealand non-profit organisations’ (NPOs) use of digital communication channels to assess if digital channels are being used effectively for stakeholder engagement. Qualitative interviews with 20 communication practitioners examined whether/how the NPOs are using multiple digital channels and identified the five most popular digital channels. The interview data was analysed using HyperRESEARCH and the five most popular channels identified overall were websites, e-newsletters, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Although the participating NPOs are all using multiple digital channels, the communication practitioners could not confidently say the channels achieve the organisation’s goals, or assist with stakeholder engagement and participation. To help assess if the channels are being used strategically and are achieving the organisations’ purposes, a quantitative content analysis of the most popular digital channels of five NPOs was undertaken. The channels’ content was also assessed to identify if the communication practitioners are using public relations theories for dialogic communication, relationship management and stakeholder engagement. Results of the interviews and the content analysis reveal that NPOs are not using their channels strategically, and are not always achieving their desired purpose. The communication approach by the NPOs is scattershot and ad hoc, and evaluation of the communication is limited. To assist NPOs to improve their use of digital channels to build effective stakeholder relationships, recommendations include using public relations theories, building a digital communication strategy, making differentiated use of individual channels – rather than using a one-size-fits all approach – and ensuring evaluation of the digital communication to maintain best practice. This should provide NPOs with evidence of improved stakeholder engagement and relationships

Government IS Implementation: A Framework for Stakeholder Orientation

Information systems (IS) researchers and management practitioners have increasingly begun to use the concept of stakeholder engagement to explain diverse outcomes associated with implementing new technology, yet the IS literature largely omits this focus in the context of enterprise systems implementation. While the literature has established stakeholder engagement‘s significance, it has not done the same for organizational stakeholder orientation. As such, I develop a theoretically sound framework to analyze organizational stakeholder orientations during a multi-partner IS implementation process. Researchers have traditionally viewed stakeholder engagement as corporate responsibility in action, but, in reality, stakeholder engagement may or may not involve a moral dimension. In this grounded theory research, I introduce a stakeholder engagement framework that contains two new constructs (i.e., stakeholder engagement and stakeholder sensitivity) and eight different dimensions guided by four major motivating factors. Additionally, I conducted a case study on a IS implementation project to analyze the stakeholder engagement for the project‘s implementation phases to capture the dynamic nature of the stakeholder engagement process and stakeholder sensitivity