Stakeholders Exploratory Vision Analysis for Stakeholder Engagement (SEVA)

The inclusive decision-making process can increase the sustainability of decisions and adopted policies, particularly for policies that address societal issues or have a social dimension. The inclusive approach to decision-making creates the opportunity to include different aspects of the issue being tackled as well as the existing knowledge. As such, stakeholder engagement is essential for informed decision-making and sustainable policy crafting. Policies designed by including the stakeholders in the decision-making process can reflect the local social characteristics, since they include the concerns, visions, and priorities of local stakeholders. The first step in engaging the stakeholders in decision-making processes is to understand their roles, responsibilities, their goals and expected outcomes for decision-making, and their vision of the addressed issue.

For example, in decision-making for disaster risk reduction, the inclusion of local stakeholders provides insights into the desired and undesired impact of different strategies. For instance, building a dike can reduce the impact of the flood while reducing the operational performance of the farming area. If the representative of local businesses is included in the decision-making process, the concern can be raised and addressed. In this example, the first step of stakeholder engagement includes understanding stakeholders’ visions about the results of disaster risk reduction. For instance, one group of stakeholders might be concerned (based on their professional missions and goals) with mitigating the impact of the flood on the industrial or farming productivities. Another group of stakeholders are more interested in reducing the impact of the flood on infrastructure (e.g., transport networks, power grids, etc.). Other stakeholders may want to lessen the disaster's impact on healthcare and emergency response. Having different visions among the stakeholders shows which aspect of the disaster risk reduction they are covering and representing. It should be noted that these visions are not the same as stakeholders’ perceptions about the priorities for reducing disaster risk (one might have the main goal of reducing the damaged buildings but give the first priority to reducing the casualties).

As another example, the solutions for building climate resilience and adaptability might call for restricting industrial activities in a region. Adopting such a policy can have a positive impact on climate adaptability and a negative impact on local businesses. On the other hand, the lack of climate adaptability can also have a negative impact on some other businesses in the long term. As such, the decision-making process should include the stakeholders that can influence the implementation of such strategies or will be affected by them. Furthermore, it is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of the stakeholders involved, which shows their vision, mission, and roles in different scenarios.

The analysis of the stakeholders' characteristics and their vision is a crucial first step in stakeholder engagement for decision-making and policy crafting. The main goal of analyzing stakeholder characteristics and their vision is to explore and understand the different stakeholders involved in the decision-making process from different perspectives. As such, the stakeholder characteristics and vision should be analyzed with exploratory methods, since, at this stage, there are no preexisting hypotheses about stakeholders. The result of this exploratory analysis can be used to design the effective stakeholder engagement framework, analyze the diversity of included stakeholders, and construct hypotheses where necessary. The comprehensive analysis calls for including different aspects of the stakeholders’ characteristics as well as the potential decisions that are planned to be evaluated. However, the large dimensions of such data can pose a challenge in analyzing stakeholders' data.

The Stakeholders Exploratory Vision Analysis (SEVA) tool is developed in the Cooperation and Transformative Governance (CAT) research group to address this challenge. SEVA is developed to analyze the stakeholders’ characteristics and vision for decision-making. The first version of SEVA was developed and used as part of the stakeholder engagement efforts in Multi-hazard and Risk-informed System for Enhanced Local and Regional Disaster Risk Management (MEDiate) project. SEVA is designed to be a simple and flexible tool for exploring the stakeholders’ characteristics and their vision in decision-making. This tool is open access, accessible at https://ry-datalab.shinyapps.io/SEVA-for-Stakeholder-Engagement/, and the users can upload their data as a .csv file to get the results. The uploaded data will not be saved by the app, and upon the expiration of the opened session, the result on the app will be replaced with the app's default data. The default data provides an example (based on simulated data) of how the app can be used to explore the relationships among different aspects of stakeholder characteristics and their vision. Users can upload the stakeholders’ characteristics and vision as two separate files. SEVA generated the results based on the variable names and labels in the uploaded files.

SEVA also provides the option to upload explanatory labels for the variables, since the variable names are usually more restrictive than the labels (this feature is optional).

Using SEVA in the first stage of stakeholder engagement provides a detailed image of stakeholders included in the process and can highlight the points of strength and possible shortcomings in the given process.

To use SEVA, click here.

Read more about the MEDiate project here and here.