THE PROBLEM OF DEFINING STAKEHOLDERS IN A SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL CONTEXT, EXAMINED VIA THE ANALYSIS OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION PROJECTS.

Abstract

There has been to date only limited consideration within the project management discipline of nonhuman actors as primordial stakeholders in projects. However, the inclusion of the roles of nonhuman actors is essential, when we consider that many projects in many areas, both within and outside the field of environmental conservation itself, such as for example in the fields of business and management, depend on natural resources for the development of their products. Despite this, natural resources tend to be overlooked in the stakeholder maps of projects in this wider context. Environmental Conservation projects are themselves especially interesting to study with regards to their stakeholder context and have been used as the experimental setting for the empirical work of this study. The primordial stakeholders of these projects are not social objects and therefore go beyond what are currently generally regarded as the limits of stakeholder theory. The study that has been used to analyse this concept is a marine conservation project based in Spain, whose primordial actor is not human. Unfortunately, these stakeholders being non-human are therefore not able to express themselves, and therefore are rarely purposely included in stakeholder analysis and management approaches, thus limiting comprehensive stakeholder mapping analyses ab initio, and handicapping realistic consideration of nonhuman actors. This study may be extrapolated and applied to the United Nation´s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 17, “Partnership for the goals”, with reference to SDG 14, which deals with marine conservation.