The Stakeholding Stench

Put yourself in the shoes of the hard-pressed (?) conservation and landscape managers for once. Running a public consultation is fraught with potential problems. Those problems can be acute if you've already decided what to do (usually the case) and you fear unpredictable outcomes from the consultation process. That was what the conservation brigade found themselves facing in the Icarus meetings in 2006 about the future of Blacka Moor. They failed to carry the day and faced ill-feeling because they were exposed for spending public money on a process that was designed from the start to mislead the participants.

The easy way out of this is to have a stakeholder consultation. This way you get to choose who is consulted and on what aspects. The trick here is to get the views of a single interest group on something outside their field or comfort zone. A real-life example is one  currently being employed by managers in the Sheffield Moors Partnership. Those consulted on among other things the future use of grazing farm livestock on the moors, the long-term look of the landscape, the wildlife priorities, and decisions on whether or not to cull red deer are single interest groups of mountain bikers, rock climbers and access groups such as ramblers. This makes it easy to get across your view because  you're persuading people who've never given these matters serious thought.

In the SMP and EMP examples this stakeholder process goes further even than that. Those outside the process, the broad mass of the public, are denied knowledge of what is being discussed, of the opportunity to make submissions and even to know who the identity of those stakeholders supposedly representing the public interest.

There are lessons here for all sorts of processes. Your aim is to be able to say that the public is behind what you want to do. Your skill as a manager lies in your judgement in selecting just those elements within the public who are predisposed to follow your lead. It's a fairly modern twist to something that's as old as the hills themselves. And it stinks now as it always did.