How can I increase my understanding of the perceptions, interests and experiences of stakeholders?

Overview

A technically sound intervention that the people affected will not accept is not an intervention. This part of the assessment framework deals with the social side of the same problem: what stakeholders believe about the risk they face, what they think should be done about it, what they stand to gain or lose from a change, and how those positions form and shift.

The approach treats risk perception not as an obstacle to be overcome but as information. Where stakeholders disagree with a technical assessment of risk, the disagreement usually identifies something the assessment has not represented — a past experience, a dependency on the current arrangement, a cost that falls on the wrong party. Recording it is how the intervention design learns.

What the methods cover

The work begins with problem definition: establishing how the problem is framed, by whom, and which framings compete. It continues with stakeholder mapping, which identifies the actors, their interests, their influence and the relationships among them, and with the analysis of the interactions between them, so that the pattern of alliances and oppositions is visible before a proposal is made.

Risk perception is then characterized in a form that can be used in modelling. Causal maps are built with stakeholders, in which the factors they see as driving risk and the causal links between them are elicited and recorded, and these maps are then analysed to identify where the system is expected to respond and where it is expected to resist. The same maps can be used to test how a proposed intervention would propagate through the system as stakeholders understand it, which frequently differs from how it propagates in the model.

The methods also cover acceptability and social acceptance: which attributes of an intervention drive acceptance, and how those attributes can be presented and, where possible, changed. And they cover the learning process itself — how understanding is shared among stakeholders during a project, and how that sharing changes the positions people hold.

How it is applied

The methods were applied in the demonstration areas through workshops and interviews, with the resulting maps and analyses feeding into the participatory modelling and the co-design processes described in the operationalization section. The outputs are used to identify likely barriers to implementation early, when they can still be addressed by design, and to establish which stakeholders a proposal depends on.

Where it leads

The results of this assessment are the inputs to the adaptive planning and participatory modelling methods in the next section of the guide, and to the stakeholder engagement protocol. Read together, they describe how an intervention is designed with the people affected rather than for them.