Mapping Stakeholder Relations: Poor Air Quality in the Pittsburgh Region
Assignment 1b from https://transitiondesignseminarcmu.net/
In assignment #1b: “Mapping Stakeholder Relations,” we were asked to map relations between a few key stakeholders in the context of our wicked problem: Air Quality in the Pittsburgh region.
The general idea is to:
- Generate an exhaustive list of stakeholders
- Find the three stakeholders least likely to agree on issues
- Visualize, as connecting threads, the issues between those parties
- Articulate if those issues represent alignment or division between said parties
- And as a result have a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities in addressing the topic at hand (in our case: air quality in the Pittsburgh region)
You can see the assignment as it was framed, here.
Generating a list stakeholders
Through our research process, and in the process of Mapping Air Quality as a Wicked Problem, we had surfaced a lot of possible stakeholders, from the individual to the collective.
These surfaced in the form of explicit lists, as well as implications from articles and other research sources:
From the beginning, one of the challenges in our research for the wicked problem map was uncoupling stakeholders from issues. For the first round of our wicked problem map, we created an affinity diagram that merged issues and stakeholders, as stakeholders allowed us (sometimes) to quickly surface the complex issues therein.
Following the digitization of the wicked problem map, our team converted the stakeholders into issues, and you can read more about that here.
Identifying stakeholders
As we completed assignment 1a, we took on an initial pass at triangulating random stakeholders. This “triading” was inspired partly from the ideas discussed in the Transition Design seminar on socio-technical-ecological systems, as well as by the explicit direction that the stakeholder map should have three primary stakeholders.
We sourced stakeholders from the team’s combined research. While we all covered broad territory during our initial research, team members had also chosen to focus topics of personal interest. For example: Yiwei on how air quality is measured; Deepika on technology and history; Hannah on laws & regulations; and Andrew on economics and divergent/peripheral parties and issues.
A short exercise in listing stakeholders in post yielded a long list of possible stakeholders, and to keep our minds open, we even considered inanimate objects/matter (built upon Actor Network Theory and, frankly, wanting to keep an open mind about things). We have approximately 250 stakeholders in our final map, and we think this is very far from an exhaustive list.
We attempted to connect some of the stakeholder triads in more and less obvious groupings. For example: UPMC, Pharmaceuticals, and the American Lung Association seem highly aligned on their surface; Superior Motors, WQED, and Eaton Corp don’t have any strong, obvious relations.
After running through the triads, the team reviewed what was on the board, returning to the prompt’s instruction that the map should be comprised of three stakeholders we speculate to be in conflict with one another.
Because of the way the wicked problem map had taken shape — seeing human activity as a root cause of air quality issues, and U.S. Steel being a particularly persistent entity in air quality issue literature and journalism — the team chose US Steel’s Edgar Thomson Works as stakeholder #1.
Edgar Thomson Works in particular was chosen at least partly because of recent litigation with Allegheny County over air quality issues; it is also interesting as a fixed, local place within a broader international corporation. The implications of choosing this plant include the presence of top-down pressure and profit-driven corporate motives, juxtaposed with employees living in communities affected by plant emissions and subject to poor air quality as a result.
We then selected the Allegheny County Health Department (ACHD) as the second stakeholder, since the Health Department was a local entity charged with helping to enforce the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Act, in the form of monitoring plant emissions. Air quality is a chief program area of the ACHD, with a “mission is to protect, promote, and preserve the health and well-being of all Allegheny County residents, particularly the most vulnerable.”
Last, through the research phase and mapping the wicked problem, we had become interested in exploring the idea of making plant life one of the stakeholders. The team decided to explore this idea as plants do a lot of the labor to clean the air we breathe, and they have no explicit agency to inform policy yet are subject to the harmful effects of poor air quality.
The Plant Life Consideration
While our team was open to the idea of considering plant life as a stakeholder, there was some debate as to which groups of plant life might make for an appropriate stakeholder on this map. We considered the role of groups like Parks & Forests, Residential Gardens & Lawns, Trees Lining Streets, and more. We mapped out plant life with those subdivisions extending from the central stakeholder.
We ultimately decided that referencing broad regional plant life as a stakeholder made the most sense, as all plants are involved in improving air quality, and while smaller stakeholder groups might be interesting to explore, their interests won’t be radically different. Addressing all plant life allows us to include more diverse issues, for example the presence of tree planting programs, or the forces at work in community gardens. It also allows us ask: what if organisms with low agency—by human standards, anyway—have a place at the table?
Connecting (t)issues
Once we had our stakeholders selected, we returned to our research materials to find issues that related to each party, and tried to see how those issues might resonate between stakeholders.
An early iteration of the map recognized that money was going to be a central theme in the diagram, and used a connecting line to bridge money-related issues.
While this approach seemed like like an interesting way to call out all money as a central issue, this would not be sustainable as the map of issues became more complex. Additionally, we though money could easily rise to the level of being an issue itself.
Draft presentation
Our draft map was presented on Wednesday 2020.02.05, along with our Wicked Problem Map. The final draft form of the map included a good but far from complete demonstration of issues. A few things to point out:
- We retained the sub-groups of the plant life stakeholder as we felt it helped visualize the ways once could think about an abstract concept like plant life (whereas Edgar Thomson Works and the ACHD might be considered less abstract concepts)
- Stakeholders got a brief description to help viewers understand the perspective of each stakeholder
- Money came through as a strong strand
- We added color to indicate alignment (green) or opposition (red) on an issue
- Line weight was used to indicate importance of the issue
Presentation feedback
- While the original canvas used images of people for each stakeholder, presentation feedback affirmed our decision to explore plant life as a stakeholder.
- We needed to keep fleshing out the connections between stakeholders
- And needed to think in more detail about money, in particular (implication: more topics on the matter; not so much a single issue)
- Our use of line weight to highlight important issues was well-received
We did a few other things
Final stakeholders map
Our final map incorporates this feedback as well as the full list of ~250 stakeholders we generated, which we placed under the map, instead of the left side so it would fit better here on Medium and on paper.
More issues were added, and while we struggled to find a single issue on which plant life and Thomson Works had alignment, two emerged:
- Plants life and Edgar Thomson Works both need air to operate. The Thomson plant literally uses forced air in the manufacturing process, and plants obviously can’t “breathe” without it.
- A more synergistic issue, though there’s an imbalance in volume: Thomson Works outputs carbon dioxide, a gas that is harmful to most animals but plants need in order to photosynthesize.
While the connections may be shaky, it’s interesting to see that one can draw connections between two parties with little other alignment.
Reflection and Conclusion
A few things about this process:
We know that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of issue complexity both in the stakeholder map and in the prior project, the wicked problem map. Mapping these things could be an ongoing project, and the few weeks we’ve had has really only allowed us to get a limited view of the issue of air quality in the Pittsburgh region. The players are so numerous and vast, and the issues are so complex. But for our learning, it’s interesting to see the ways in which issues and stakeholders are so entwined with one another, and how many of the entwinements loop back on themselves time and time again.
During the research process, our team’s diverse make-up helped inform discussions and directions that we absolutely wouldn’t have explored otherwise. What sort of ideas might emerge with truly diverse set of stakeholders gathered in a room? What issues might be raised? What insights might be gained?
