To effectively establish Watershed Investment Programs (WIPs), you need to engage with stakeholders responsible for, benefiting from, and funding watershed stewardship and water management in your area of focus.
Mapping these stakeholders and analysing their mandates and priorities needs to be undertaken in the pre-feasibility phase to determine which stakeholders matter to the NbS process and how to engage them. The process to do this effectively, is broadly outlined below.
See the Stakeholder Engagement Deep Dive for further reading.
STEP 1
DEFINE the scope of your analysis.
Before identifying stakeholders relevant to the project, the water security challenge and target location need to be defined, so that the framing questions are made very clear. When mapping your stakeholders, you need to first understand, What is the water security issue at stake? What is the change objective? Where are the proposed NbS interventions taking place?
STEP 2
IDENTIFY the relevant actors and set up their basic profiles.
It is necessary to identify and list all actors relevant to the WIP. When assessing actors, ensure that you identify who can positively or negatively impact the project’s funding, implementation and maintenance both upstream and downstream, and who has the responsibility to enact change. Figure 3 illustrates the types of actors relevant to this. It is also important to understand who is already working on the issue and who is facing similar water security issues.
Once you have identified your relevant actors, note their agendas including their water security mandate, their mission, their strategic objectives and their interests. The aim here is to decipher stakeholders’ motivation and priorities. Next, outline each stakeholders’ arena of work. Detail their area of work, knowledge of water security challenges and outreach capabilities. Finally, determine stakeholders’ alliances with other actors. Determine if there is existing coordination between actors or if there are conflicts between actors that could impact the project’s success.
STEP 3
ANALYSE the actors’ interest and influence
Once you have identified the relevant actors, you need to analyse their interest in the project’s purpose and their influence on the project’s success. This can be done using an influence-interest matrix (see figure below). This matrix helps illustrate who your key stakeholders are and how to engage them.
STEP 4
MAP the analysis of your stakeholders
Create a stakeholder map to visualise your analysis. This map is useful to understand relationships and to analyse the nature of engagements. First, plot your actors based on their sector, importance and level of influence. Stakeholders are represented by circles: the bigger the circle, the bigger the influence of the actor in the water security challenge at stake. Circles with the letters VP indicate veto players, meaning that these actors may have the ability to hinder or block the project.
Step 5
BUILD a stakeholder database
A stakeholder map is useful to understand relationships and to analyse the nature of engagements. Equally useful and imperative is to tabulate this information in the form of a stakeholder database, using the key primary and secondary stakeholder categorisations. The table below shows an example of how this can be done. It’s helpful to create this in an easily searchable format.
Step 6
ENGAGE your stakeholders
As a final step, building on the analysis from the stakeholder interest-impact matrix (Step 3), engage your stakeholders in different ways based on their needs. This engagement will vary depending on where you are in the WIP process.
Resources
Stakeholder Mapping
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