Who are Stakeholders?

Project Stakeholders are individuals who are able to influence the success of any project in terms of their characteristic presence as follows:

  • Stakes
  • Claims
  • Share
  • Interest

Stakeholders can have positive or negative views regarding a given project. But their views and concerns must be taken into consideration for necessary reconciliation in order to gain maximum satisfaction out of optimum utilization of limited resources. Justifiably the role of various kinds of Stakeholders and the influences they have on the implementation of a given project must be understood in order to avoid any kind of serious problem in course of project implementation overtime.

Importance of Stakeholders

The above situation clearly reminds us that the project management must formulate strategies for dealing with different levels of stakeholder groups. The project management must allocate adequate resources in terms of skilled staff and money to deal with the stake holder issues.  The prime task of the project management in this respect is to identify various kinds of Stakeholders and their roles in project implementation. This stakeholder’s analysis should be done at the conceptual stage of the project by looking through the concerns and interests of different kinds of stakeholders and be strategically included during formulation of logical frame-work of the project.

Kinds of Stakeholders

The major categories of Stakeholders are stated below:

  1. Project Champions: This kind of Stakeholders sees a valid reason in the implementation of the project. Project Champions include politicians, community leaders, project clients or customers and the like.
  2. Project Participants: This refers to organizations and individuals who are responsible for planning and executing the project. Examples include project team, engineers, vendors, suppliers, and other relevant agencies.
  3. Community Participants: Groups and individuals who are directly affected by the project. Target groups, target community, religious groups, special interest groups, etc.,   are included as community participants.
  4. Parasitic Participants: Parasitic Participants include organizations and individuals who do not have direct stake in the project such as opportunists, the activists and others who are looking for a platform to promote their own causes.

The concerns of Stakeholder’s situations in course of project implementation should be tracked regularly through project monitoring and evaluation systems. Impact evaluation should also capture the influence of project Stakeholders on the overall goal of any project.