Mapping Stakeholder Relations
Carnegie Mellon, Transition Design Seminar 2021
Team Synergy — Aashrita Indurti, Madeline Sides, Monica Chang, Sian Sheu
“Shell and petrochemicals are not nor will be a positive economic development strategy for southwestern Pennsylvania and the Greater Ohio River Valley region,” — Matt Mehalik, Executive Director, Pittsburgh’s Breathe Project
Poor Waste Management as a Wicked Problem
The exercise outlined below follows the first assignment in the Transition Design Seminar, Mapping a Wicked Problem, for which we analyzed the problem of poor waste management in Pittsburgh and visualized connections between its social, technical, environmental, economic, and political factors. Building off this initial work, we then deepened our focus to learn about the stakeholders who have ties to this issue in Pittsburgh.
Why is waste management a wicked problem? According to Professors Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, many, if not all, problems of social policy are “wicked” in that they cannot be definitively described, raise questions about the nature of what constitutes a public good and cannot be addressed with simple, science-based solutions. As delineated in our first article, the waste situation in Pittsburgh is inextricably tied to a complexity of issues, including waste production, human health, and environmental wellbeing.
The Role of Stakeholders
The Transition Design framework “place[s] stakeholder concerns and collaboration at the heart of the problem solving process” (Irwin and Kossoff), drawing on best practices from social sciences and peace-keeping work. Through mapping the wicked problem, it became clear to us that poor waste management in Pittsburgh involves multiple stakeholders with differing agendas across spectrums of influence and power in the city and region. Understanding areas of alignment and disagreement amongst key players can surface opportunity spaces critical to mitigating the wicked problem.
Given the remote learning format of this year’s course, we relied heavily on secondary sources including city reports, news articles, and social media. Although we did speak with a few primary sources, we consider this a speculative exercise because of our majority use of secondary sources for research. In practice, mapping out stakeholder relations would involve extensive direct engagement with primary sources.
Selecting Stakeholders
Tasked with identifying the stakeholders most likely to disagree or have conflicting opinions, we started brainstorming all the stakeholders involved in Pittsburgh’s waste management process that we had learned of during our initial research phase. We plotted our list of nearly 70 stakeholders — first on a spectrum from less to more power (Left to Right), then by our estimation of their level of motivation to maintain or improve the status quo of waste management (Up and Down).
Our group’s discussion during Transition Design Seminar on February 24 centered on the concept of power — where it comes from, who is privy to it, and how it manifests through different scales of influence. From[Michael Mann’s concluding chapter from In The Sources of Social Power: Volume 4: Globalizations], we recognized that power manifests in many different ways. We decided to consider the power our stakeholders have in various spheres of influence, highlighting political and cultural spectrums as particularly relevant to our context.
The political-cultural power matrix exposed some interesting and unexpected relationships. When considering multiple types of power, we saw greater integration of humans and non-humans into the higher end of the power spectrum, whereas our singular analysis of power favored institutions. Looking at clusters of stakeholders, we noted areas of the matrix that could lead to possible allyship (those high in political but low in cultural power, and those high in cultural but low in political power) or exploitative relationships (those low in both types of power by those high in both types of power).
With these dimensions in mind, we situated our decisions in the local context by researching specific stakeholder groups in Pittsburgh. We ultimately chose a group of stakeholders that occupy different spaces on the political-cultural power spectrum, have diverse motivations to change or maintain the status quo of waste management, and cover represent a variety of local interests from the human to non-human.
Selected stakeholders
Office of Mayor Peduto — high power, high cultural influence
The office of Pittsburgh’s Mayor since 2014 represents influence over institutions, laws, and economic decisions.
Shell Petrochemical Plant — high power, low cultural influence
The newly opened regional petrochemical plant, a site of raw plastic production from natural gas, represents manufacturing motivations, economic impact, and influence in growing class tensions.
“Workers”— low power, medium-low cultural influence
Manual laborers, including sanitation workers, represent an influential voting block, Pittsburgh’s heritage as a “working class” city, and intersections with race and class dynamics.
Environmental Nonprofits — medium power, medium cultural influence
Local environmental nonprofits represent intersecting agendas of human health and environmental wellbeing, as well as changing socio-economic dynamics in Pittsburgh and across the U.S.
Water — low power, high cultural influence
Water includes Pittsburgh’s waterways (in particular the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers), the organisms that live in it, and drinking water, representing a key piece of Pittsburgh life and identity.
Research Methods
Secondary Research
Our group made use of news articles, city press releases, social media, and official reports to collage together an understanding of stakeholder perspectives and relationships. We benefitted from the prior work of Regions 20 — Regions of Climate Action (R20) who did primary stakeholder research in 2016 to understand Pittsburgh’s possible path to being “Zero Waste”. The report they produced, helped us to identify stakeholders and understand the dynamics of waste management in the Pittsburgh area. In reviewing secondary sources, we took care to collect quotes from stakeholder groups when possible.
Primary Research
We were able to speak directly with representatives from the following nonprofits: Allegheny Cleanways, Creek Connections, 3 Rivers Wet Weather, and Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. All of these nonprofits have a vested interest in environmental and human health, and hold positive working relationships with the City government and waste management companies. First-hand engagement enabled us to understand our stakeholders in a more direct, personal way.
Mapping it Out
Reflecting on the Mapping Process
The work of understanding stakeholder relations is an iterative process of research and visualization. For this assignment, we worked from a stakeholder relations template provided by the Transition Design Seminar class. Our group opted to display five different stakeholder groups on this map, placing the Mayor’s office in the center.
The mapping exercise consists of filling in quotes from each group that illustrate their hopes and fears related to this problem space. Where possible, we used actual quotes from stakeholders, or created first-person “We” statements based on research. Mapping then involved drawing lines of connection between these sentiments of stakeholders and labeling the connection lines with text to add nuance to the relationship.
Red is used to indicate lines of conflict or disagreement, Green represents alignment or agreement, and Grey represents complexity or ambiguity in alignment. The resultant web of connections yields a rich picture of the problem in Pittsburgh, in complement to our Wicked Problem Map.
Insights and Observations
The mapping exercise shed light for us on the dynamics of waste management in Pittsburgh, particularly in terms of the relationship that the city government and Mayor’s office has with key stakeholders.
We were initially unable to discern the dynamic between the city government and local environmental NGOs when it came to waste management. Luckily, we were able to have firsthand conversations with leaders of some of these organizations. We learned that, for those we spoke with, the relationship between these groups and the city is quite amicable and cooperative. These stakeholder groups share goals of making Pittsburgh clean and livable, and each relies on the work of the other to see their vision realized.
While the above alliance appears stable, we came to learn that the relationship between sanitation workers and the city government has been put to the test in recent months. The COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in times of highest community spread, put the city government and workers at odds. Workers rightfully demanded protection on the job, and asked for hazard pay and PPE to perform their duties. The city struggled to meet these basic demands, citing budgetary constraints and a limited pool of workers when quarantines temporarily cut their workforce.
We believe that this relationship is characterized by fear. The Mayor fears worker strikes and bad press during these moments of crisis, and workers fear their job security and personal safety. News coverage of worker concerns and union activism during the pandemic in Pittsburgh helped our team to understand this relationship, as well as watching an episode of “Undercover Boss”. In this episode from 2014, Mayor Peduto goes undercover and shadows municipal employees, including sanitation workers and arborists, to gain firsthand awareness of the hard work done by city staff.
Finally, we studied the relationship of Shell Chemical Appalachia (part of Royal Dutch Shell) to the greater Pittsburgh region. Shell is in the midst of constructing a massive ethylene “cracker” plant to create polyethylene, the raw material of Pittsburgh’s future trash. Shell is not a longstanding part of the local politics of waste management, but our other stakeholders certainly wish to influence Shell’s activity in the region.
Local environmental NGOs have strongly opposed the plant, and Mayor Peduto, with his dual promises of economic growth and regional sustainability, has been caught in the middle. The plant is being built outside of Pittsburgh and outside of Peduto’s jurisdiction, but he has been urged by locals to oppose the plant by any means possible, given the risk to local human and environmental health that it presents. Peduto has received pressure to stay out of the Shell debate, from interests more aligned with regional job creation and the economic prospects of industrial workers. The plant construction and operations are on track, but recent drops in the global price of polyethylene threaten its future in Pittsburgh.
Next Steps
This mapping exercise advanced our understanding of local politics in Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and the surrounding region. This awareness will be invaluable as we move toward identifying possible points of intervention in a complex wicked problem. The next step in understanding this socio-technical system, prior to suggesting interventions, is developing a historical understanding of the problem’s evolution and co-evolution alongside other wicked problems, using the Multi-level Perspective framework.
Sources
Quote by Matt Mehalik, executive director of Pittsburgh’s Breathe Project: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04062020/shell-plastics-plant-pittsburgh-coronavirus/
Other sources cited in-line.
