SEVA: Flexible Tool for Stakeholders Exploratory Vision Analysis in Decision-Making

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, whether its tackling disaster risk reduction, climate adaptability or any other resilience building. 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.

The analysis of the stakeholders' characteristics and their vision is a crucial first step in stakeholder engagement for decision-making. 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. In this manner, the stakeholder characteristics and vision should be analyzed with exploratory methods. 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.

Cooperation and Transformative Governance (CAT) released the first version of Stakeholders Exploratory Vision Analysis (SEVA), new tool for Stakeholders’ vision analysis. SEVA is a flexible web app for exploring the stakeholder’s characteristics and visions ant their relations. 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 practical practically usable for effective stakeholder engagements.

Read more about SEVA here.

To use SEVA, click here.

Read more about the MEDiate project here and here.