Stakeholder Mapping Insights from SPADES Pilots
As SPADES continues to unpack findings from the diagnosis phase, stakeholder mapping across the pilots provides insight into key actors and their roles, influence, and interests in spatial planning processes. Key insights per stakeholder groups include:
Public sector dominance with the risk of fragmentation
Public-sector actors play a central role across the pilots. Public authorities, including ministries, regional authorities, municipalities and agencies, hold the strongest formal decision-making power due to their planning and land-use mandates. However, influence is often distributed across departments and administrative levels. This highlights the importance of coordination among existing public actors.
High engagement but limited influence in civil society
Civil society actors such as NGOs, community groups, farmers and local initiatives are consistently highly engaged across pilots. However, their formal influence on decision-making remains limited, meaning their contributions risk remaining consultative unless clearer pathways into governance processes are established.
Selective but strategic private-sector involvement
Private-sector actors appear less systematically across pilots but can be influential where land, infrastructure or investment decisions are involved. Engagement tends to increase when regulatory requirements, financial risks or operational responsibilities are directly affected.
Underused academic and knowledge capacity
Academic and research institutions are present across pilots and demonstrate strong analytical capacity and interest, but are not typically positioned in influential roles. This limits their potential contribution to knowledge integration, evaluation and cross-sector collaboration.
Towards more efficient engagement
Across pilots, governance contexts are consistently complex and institutionally dense. How to support more effective stakeholder engagement? The findings suggest the importance of active coordination of public authorities, clearer roles for civil society and academia, and early engagement of high-influence actors around concrete mandates, risks and implementation needs.
A deeper dive into stakeholder mapping
As SPADES moves into the co-creation phase, pilots are invited to revisit their stakeholder mapping and reflect on how engagement strategies can better support soil integration into spatial planning. The Co-creation workbook presents specific reflection questions.
For detailed descriptions on the steps of the stakeholder mapping in SPADES, visit the Diagnosis Workbook chapter 4 on Stakeholder mapping.
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