Mapping Stakeholders from the Bottom-Up

This Wednesday, will be the second last class of the SPPG course, Making an Impact from the Outside. For the past three weeks, we have been working on our final project, an advocacy strategy. My group’s final project is focused on food security. The project has been very challenging, but challenging is good!

The challenge last week was deciding how to make an impact on food insecurity — addressing the structural issues or helping the food insecure now. Harpreet Sahota’s blog post wonderfully reflects on this challenge.

For this post, I would like to focus on a later stage: stakeholder mapping.

Stakeholder mapping requires identifying relevant stakeholders, their interests, and their potential impact. I’ve done exercises similar to this before, however, it was from a governmental perspective. Stakeholder mapping from outside the governments perspective changes the relevant stakeholders. The government often uses a top-down approach and their relevant stakeholders are national and provincial organizations or those with significant capacity. Stakeholder mapping at the community level brings in smaller local stakeholders. Smaller does not mean worse, as these stakeholders are able to act now to help their community.

Many of these smaller local organizations, however, were hard to identify through online web searches. This lead me to believe that there is likely ‘invisible’ organizations or people that can’t be identified through web searches. It requires physical, on the ground work and interaction with the community involved with the issue. Another important tactic, that has been repeated often throughout the course, is who do I know right now. Often who you know can help you identify important stakeholders you can’t see.