We have just discussed why making an actor or stakeholder analysis may be important.
Now we are going to do an actor analysis.
There are six basic steps.
And we will go through these steps one by one
and we will illustrate each step
with an example from practice which we call: 'Wind at Sea',
with the Netherlands national government as the problem owner
and wanting to stimulate the generation of "green" wind energy at sea.
We will first take the first three steps
and then, I will treat the next three.
So.
We take the problem formulation of the client as point of departure.
We then make an inventory of the actors involved,
map their formal relations
and then make an inventory of their interests, objectives and perceptions
We try to find out about their interdependencies:
what are their resources and salience?
And finally, we think about
and list the implications for problem formulation and for the client
We will first take
Step 1: Problem formulation of the client as point of departure
In our first step
What do we have here? Well,
The problem owner is the Ministry of Economic Affairs
as they are responsible for the national energy policy in the Netherlands
What is the problem or the cleft?
Well, there is insufficient capacity installed at sea
and we won't make the target.
What causes the problem?
Well, generating wind energy is relatively expensive
and the production is intermittent: dependent on weather conditions.
So, the dilemma or problem is:
Economic Affairs want to have more off-shore power
but, without impeding security of the Dutch energy supply and affordability
So.
Well, this first step was quite straightforward.
We now come to the second step:
Making an inventory of the actors.
Here, we use the basic modeling techniques
taught in the Principles of Policy Analysis course.
Don't worry, I will lead you through the steps quickly and,
if you really don't know,
you will find these basic analytical modeling techniques explained
in Chapter 3 of the course book
and on our open course ware pages.
The basic method for making an inventory of actors
is by using your preliminary causal diagram or systems diagram
and by asking two questions:
(1) Which actors can actually influence important factors in my system?
And (2) Who has an interest in the problem and/or is affected by the possible solutions?
So, there are two I's:
Influence and Interest!
So, we start from the Ministry of Economic Affairs:
What are its objectives?
As we just learned,
they want more off-shore power generation
without impeding the security of the Dutch energy supply
and affordability.
So, here at the right,
we put 'percentage off-shore power generation'
and affordability which we translate into 'costs of energy provision',
and thirdly 'security of supply'.
And at the left we put their means:
'subsidies' and 'granting licenses'.
Both means positively influence
the 'number of new wind farms' and the licences
will also influence the size of the windparks;
'number' and 'size', on their turn, influence
the 'installed capacity at sea' and the 'investment cost'.
The 'installed capacity' on its turn influences the objectives
'percentage off-shore generation'
and the 'investment cost' influence the 'cost of energy provision'.
This is a nice basis which we will detail a little bit further.
The investment costs are an important factor,
so let's take a look there.
At sea, the waterdepth is a very important cost factor.
What else at the cost side?
Well, transport costs of the generated energy are important
and these are influenced by the distance between windfarms
and the connection point at land.
Costs are also influenced by scale:
the bigger the project, the more scale advantages.
And well, what about the capacity?
Capacity is not only determined by the number and size of the windfarms
but also by the wind itself: the 'average windspeed at location'.
There is one criterion left now,
which is: security of energy supply.
Wind does not always blow, so there needs to be a dynamic balance
between the supply and the demand of energy.
What factors determine this balance?
Well, storage capacity and the number of international connections
might be the factors here.
Well.
Now we can ask our two questions:
We just ended with the balance on the net;
clearly the network administrator 'Tennet' is responsible here,
and the EU determines the number of international connections
while the energy companies, the power generators and R&D agencies
do research after energy storage.
The energy companies are the main investors in windpower generation
and finally, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment
is responsible for planning at sea
and thus determines the location:
waterdepth and distance to shore.
So, we covered the INFLUENCE part and now we turn to the INTEREST part.
We ask the question:
"Who holds an interest in the project and/or who will be affected by the project?"
or to be more precise:
"Who holds an interest in any of the factors in our system?"
When looking at the means, it is the investors:
the energy companies and the project developers
who hold an interest in speeding up the permits and getting subsidies for the project.
We also discover new parties.
There are other users of the Northsea:
fisherman with their boats and their organizations,
the off shore oil industry, the shipping companies and harbor authorities
who all worry about shipping lanes and freedom of access.
So, they have a stake in the number of windparks, farms, their location and size.
And we see a number of familiar faces too:
The EU and its international connections,
Tennet, the network administrator with stakes in security of delivery and transport cost;
the energy companies worrying about costs
and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment
worrying about the percentage of wind in our energy mix.
We have now seen how you can use INFLUENCE and INTEREST
as tools to identify actors involved in an issue.
But of course, there are other ways too.
And sometimes, these are easier or faster
or they may lead you to actors or groups you otherwise might have missed
Some important other methods are:
Look at the formal positions in a decision making process
who has a role in formal decision making?
We will come back to this in step 3.
Reputation is another one:
you ask people 'who else is important', 'who are the focal organizations'?
This is often called 'snowballing':
by asking around more and more people stick to your snowball.
Another one is social participation: who are active in this field or society?
And who are the vocal people, the opinion leaders?
Demographic characteristics may also be a good criterium:
are all social groups represented,
do we have the elderly, the youngsters, the first nation people and the immigrants?
Well.
Just to give you an impression of what a good use
of the presented actor identification techniques may lead to,
we now show you the longlist of actors we created for our wind energy case.
We listed only 44 of them, but believe me, there are many moreů.
Now that we have been able to identify everyone involved in a problem or policy issue,
what shall we do?
Do we need to take along everyone in our inquiries
or can we make a smart selection to reduce our workload without impeding the quality of our analysis?
Well, think back to the dispersed pollution example.
I showed you there were over 80 parties involved.
You cannot take along all 80.
You have to come up with a trick to make it manageable.
Well, there are a couple of rules of thumb.
The first is that you should realize that the problem owner is an actor too
and there may be more powerful parties involved than your problem owner alone.
So, how to make a short list?
Well, you can reduce the number of actors in your analysis
if only you keep the balance with the level you have chosen in your problem.
And there should be a balance between the different interests and positions
for instance you have five environmental NGO's all wanting more or less the same,
or three Ministries trying to reach the same objective
although for different reasons,
you may combine them and you call them 'joint NGO's' or 'joint Ministries'.
Be pragmatic.
10 t0 15, maybe 20 is enough
if only you cover the whole spectrum of concerns and issues.
And then remember: any analysis is an iterative process.
You learn along the way, so you can always add or remove actors to/from your list.
So.
There are practical methods to help you reduce your longlist.
the trick is called stakeholder analysis
and at this stage we use it in a very rough and unscientific way:
namely, mostly based on your own common sense.
What we suggest you to do at this stage is to use a so-called power/interest grid.
a matrix with two axes which allows you to order your actors.
And you recognize our two I's here: Influence and Interest!
The axes of the grid are power at the bottom with the high end to the right,
and interest to the left with high interest on top.
These two axes we use to form four quadrants
and now we start positioning the actors on our longlist
according to our estimation of their relative power and their relative interest.
Do you remember the colorful map on diffuse pollution?
It held four of these grids!
So.
When we have
positioned our actors in the grid,
we consider the parties on the top right as 'Players':
they are the ones we think are holding important means
and are having interest in the subject.
Those are the parties that should be taken along!
The ones on the bottom left are considered 'Crowd':
they have neither interest in the subject, nor means. So, we can ignore them.
The top left are labelled 'Subjects' :
they may be interested or affected but have low power.
So we leave them out for now, if needed we can take them on board later.
And finally, at the bottom right we have the 'Context setters':
these actors might be important.
They have important means that you might need to solve the issue
but they are not very interested yet.
If the latter changes or you expect that it might change in the near future,
you should definitely take them along, have them on board and put them into your analysis.
Now we know whom to take along in our analysis by making our shortlist
and we have to note down our first results.
A practical way to do this is by filling out a simple table
and by jotting down in the columns
the values, perceptions, resources, the actors we selected for
further inquiry and we tried to see the networks they are operating in.
This is no longer a quick and dirty thing, though.
For information on the shortlisted actors you have to do research.
Desk research to start with, but maybe also by interviewing people.
Nowadays you will probably start by exploring the website of
the agency, the company or NGO you want to know more about.
You track their mission statements to find out their values,
perceptions and maybe their means and objectives in this specific issue.
You check with whom they cooperate in all kinds of projects,
you download relevant documents and reports, their annual reports,
and then analyse them.
You learn about the players in your game!
So, this is the example of starting to fill out this matrix.
There is one last issue about making an inventory of actors that we need to discuss:
how to go about with composed actors.
Take the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment in our ' Wind at sea' example.
It is a big organization with many different departments. If only the cleft between
the infrastructure guys, the ones who love concrete and tarmac,
and the environment guys, who like trees and fresh air.
In such cases, you have to check if the Ministry is speaking with one voice
or if different departments have their own voice.
Beware, this seems typical for government organizations
but the same does happen in the private sector.
Think back of our Brent Spar example
where Shell Germany and Shell The Netherlands, confronted with this consumer boycot
started opposing the decision by Shell UK to dump the Brent Spar.
But it might also work the other way around.
The energy producers for instance,
rather than being individual companies like Vattenfall or Essent or Eneco,
have much more in common and they can be seen as one actor: EnergieNed.
So, your rule is:
select the highest possible organizational level,
without losing relevant information or including irrelevant goals.
And the other rule is:
don't use categories like consumers or private sector,
in that case you need a spokesperson or an organization representing such a category