Defining and identifying relevant stakeholders to advance effective conservation

Stakeholder is a contested term that has spawned a multitude of ad hoc definitions. The ambiguity of these definitions has oftentimes impeded transdisciplinary research in environmental governance and conservation science because it hampers effective communication and operationalization of the stakeholder concept. We devised a project-configurable definition of stakeholder that integrates 2 stakeholder typologies: the holder types of Schmitter (e.g., knowledge, right, space, and interest holders) and the salience model (power, legitimacy, urgency, and proximity) of Mitchell et al. From a conceptual perspective, we synthesized role-based and salience-based views of stakeholder to the following definition: a stakeholder is someone who takes on one or several different roles relating to an issue for whom that issue has a certain baseline level of priority. Building on this definition, we produced a 6-step conceptual stakeholder identification workflow. The workflow combines expert discussion, structured stakeholder scoring, and iterative validation to narrow an initial actor universe to a transparent and defensible stakeholder set. We applied the method to a hypothetical peatland rewetting project in Central Europe to showcase how network boundaries and salience thresholds can be refined in order to move from an initially large set of actors to a documented and manageable set of stakeholders. Our definition of stakeholder and the identification workflow aim to offer scientists, managers, and policy makers a transparent tool for selecting, ranking, and justifying the actors who most urgently need to be at the table.