The Stakeholder Selection Process

A key issue in tomorrow’s exciting world of stakeholder ‘capitalism’ is - exactly who selects those stakeholders, why, and for what purpose? Because - regardless of who - you better hope they represent your interests. And in that regard, hope is the appropriate word.

So for this purpose I browsed the web, expecting to drag up just a few key documents on the topic of biodiversity conservation - from the likes of the World Bank or the Global Environment Facility. Little did I know that apparently, this stakeholder selection process appears to require an advanced degree… of sorts - probably from the Rockefeller University or an equivalent purveyor of the best scientific consensus available.

A frequent feature during the stakeholder selection process is sending potentials a survey to be filled out - which, if you think about it, is bloody convenient, because it allows for inconveniencies to be filtered out without even having to speak to them. But before we start properly mocking that, let’s quickly summarise what we discoverd in prior documents -

The 12 Malawi Principles¹ also known as the Ecosystem Approach taught us -

• That management should be decentralised to the extent possible. This, of course, means that someone will decide when and if this decentralisation is convenient.

• That the ecosystem approach should be undertaken at the appropriate spatial and temporal scales. There’s the call for someone to judge what’s appropriate. This further ties in with the ‘Landscape Approach’, and the Global Environment Facility, as they structure those blended finance deals using the ‘Landscape Approach’.

• We then add that the ecosystem approach should consider all forms of relevant information. But exactly who will dictate what’s relevant?

• And yet more arbitrary decisions are called for through the ecosystem approach should involve all relevant sectors of society and scientific disciplines.

To sum up this lot - someone will decide upon the level of decentralisation, the spatial and temporal scale, what comprise relevant information, and which sectors of society and science disciplines are considered relevant. The Convention on Biological Diversity also supply us an ‘Advanced User Guide’ should you need further detail². That document, however, does not detail how the stakeholder selection process should proceed.

The Ecosystem Approach

Next up, the Landscape Approach³ taught us that -

• The objective is adaptive management, which in short means act on input as they come in. It enables arbitrary rule, but that’s not the point here, because it doesn’t answer the key question as to who said ‘stakeholders’ would be in the first place.

• Stakeholders ‘will only join the process if they judge it to be in their interest‘. It doesn’t state in whose interests, but it does further detail that ‘Solutions to problems need to be built on shared negotiation processes based on trust‘, which in reality is a setup for what comes next - ‘Trust emerges when objectives and values are shared‘. In other words, only people in broad agreement are likely to become ‘stakeholders’.

• We then see that ‘Developing a landscape approach requires a patient iterative process of identifying stakeholders‘, which essentially means that ‘stakeholders’ during the earlier stages will be removed from consideration, further confirmed by ‘Stakeholders and their concerns are not static but will change‘. The same principle (5) further adds ‘… aspire to involving all stakeholder groups in decision-making, the transaction costs of doing this comprehensively can be prohibitive…‘, which then means budgetary constraints can be used as an excuse to dismiss… ‘problems’.

• The article continues ‘Trust among stakeholders is a basis for good management‘, and further adds that ‘The need to coordinate activities by diverse actors requires that a shared vision can be agreed upon. This requires a broad consensus on general goals, challenges, and concerns, as well as on options and opportunities‘. I mean, it should be painfully obvious - if you’re in disagreement, then you’re not to be trusted, and that leads to poor management (allegedly), and thus the iteration of stakeholders will see you booted.

• Finally, we see that ‘People require the ability to participate effectively and to accept various roles and responsibilities. Such participation presupposes certain skills and abilities (social, cultural, financial)‘ which in reality could easily mean you have to accept some hard-left Marxist ESG carp as gospel, or you simply will fall short of the skillset required, which also is helpfully summarised thusly ‘Effective participation makes demands of stakeholders‘. But which demands?

And to summarise - ‘stakeholders’ will join the project if they ‘share values’, because those (allegedly) leads to ‘trust’, which is a prerequisite for ‘good management’. To remove the few who erroneously slipped through the filter, they can always institute some new ‘skill requirement’, which will be used to eliminate you through ‘stakeholder iteration’. In other words, this is an outline of how to create a bench in total agreement with those who pick these ‘stakeholders’, thus leading to a dictatorship… but it doesn’t actually highlight who’s driving the process.

The Landscape Approach

So with all of this in mind - let’s find out who selects those other stakeholders, in what capacity, and… well, who the hell is really in charge?