Heterogeneous Group Of Stakeholders Research Articles

Harnessing the Potential of Living Labs in European Research Projects on Agriculture. The Case of Promoting Prudent Use of Antimicrobials in Livestock

SummaryThe urgency to reduce the use of antimicrobials in the livestock sector has become part of the European Farm‐to‐Fork agenda. To develop innovations and pave the way for prudent antimicrobial use (AMU), the H2020 four‐year‐long ROADMAP project implemented the approach of Living Labs (LL). It stands for a process that involves a heterogeneous group of stakeholders in co‐creation, testing and evaluating innovations in real‐world contexts. The use of LLs has gained momentum to accelerate transformation of European agriculture by developing innovations through end‐user (farmer) involvement. However, the LL‐approach is new in the livestock sector. During the project, 11 LLs were established in seven European countries, each with its own settings but linked to the project's overarching goals. Some LLs developed a common understanding of AMU within the sector or between farmers and veterinarians, while others focussed on policy development or better management practices. During the ROADMAP project, we learned about the potential and limitations of the LL approach in the livestock sector. Using the approach of social innovations, we developed recommendations on how to realise the potential of LLs in a research context to meet the goals of the EU Farm‐to‐Fork strategy of prudent AMU.

Supply of Medical Aids in home Mechanical Ventilation: needs-Based and Safe? - The Views of Stakeholders Related to the Care Process on the Current Status and Perspectives

The supply of medical aids is essential for patients with home mechanical ventilation. However, it is largely unclear to what extent this supply is needs-based and safe. As part of a health services research project, 20 expert interviews were conducted with a heterogeneous group of stakeholders related to ventilation-specific medical aids supply. The interviews were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The interviewees pointed to challenges and problems regarding structural, procedural and personal aspects at all levels of medical aids supply. In particular, deficits in task performance, coordination and cooperation between the stakeholders and authorities involved became apparent. Such might result in avoidable safety risks and hinder needs-oriented supply of medical aids. Further development in ventilation-associated medical aids supply is needed, with focus on evidence-based practices, a comprehensive, cross-sectoral and cross-professional design as well as systematic evaluation.

A Framework to Assess Possible Sources of Stakeholder Exploitation: A Developing Country Case

Solving complex post-disaster reconstruction challenges requires the altruistic involvement of heterogeneous stakeholder groups. However, small, more organized groups, such as government parastatals, private developers, and contractors often exploit large, unorganized groups, such as affected communities, leaving them more vulnerable to future disasters. Based on data collected from a case study in Pakistan, this study proposed a framework to assess, anticipate, and mitigate the exploitation of vulnerable stakeholders in post-disaster reconstruction projects. The framework draws on influential management theories and utilizes reciprocal relationships between stakeholder attributes (power, legitimacy, and urgency), participation, and exploitation. The study also argued for non-binary treatment of stakeholder attributes. The framework will allow practitioners to address issues around the exploitation of stakeholder interests in future post-disaster reconstruction projects.

How do stakeholder groups make sense of sustainability: Analysing differences in the complexity of their cognitive frames

AbstractCharacterizing major sustainability issues as ‘grand challenges’ has led to a call for collaboration among heterogeneous stakeholder groups, not least in multi‐stakeholder initiatives (MSIs). Research into MSIs has made substantial progress in understanding their workings; yet, it is still criticized for remaining undertheorized, echoing a criticism of management studies generally as paying insufficient attention to the micro–macro divide. Hence, we examined differences between stakeholder groups in the complexity of their cognitive frames on the topic of sustainability. We analysed 265 cognitive frames across four stakeholder groups (business, government, NGO, education). Analysing these frames in terms of the two dimensions of cognitive complexity—differentiation and integration—we found statistically significant differences in frame complexity between stakeholder groups. These micro‐level cognitive differences can explain macro‐level problems in stakeholder engagement and communication. Hence, we conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the enhancement of the effectiveness of MSIs.

Co-designing management recommendations with stakeholders: A case study about northern pike (Esox lucius) in the southern Baltic Sea

Involving all interest groups, often called stakeholders, is increasingly recognized as a key part of sustainable natural resource management, promoting acceptability and compliance with management decisions. However, there is the difficulty of how to build trust, integrate diverse knowledge bases and account for varying objectives of different stakeholders. We present insights from a fisheries stakeholder process that used structured decision making and participatory modelling in a workshop series over the course of three years to develop management advice for a northern pike (Esox lucius) meta-population inhibiting brackish lagoons of the southern Baltic Sea in Germany. The stock is co-exploited by commercial and recreational fisheries who are in conflict over space and fish and vary in values. We formed and professionally facilitated a stakeholder group composed of 15 representatives of all main interest groups. The workshops generated a shared vision and seven mutually agreed management objectives that combined aspects of biological, ecological, economic, and social sustainability. To meet objectives, the group identified more than 40 management options, revolving around stock monitoring, control and surveillance, knowledge transfer, harvest regulations, habitat management, predator control and pike stocking. Participatory model building provided forecasts on the impacts of selected management options, allowing to transparently examine trade-offs based on quantitative criteria matched to objectives. The process overall led to stakeholder consensus about multiple management tools that the group recommended to government officials for future management reform. Challenges remain as to the communication of irreducible ecological and social uncertainties associated with quantitative predictions. In this context, cognitive maps about cause-and-effect relationships affecting pike were found useful to integrate knowledge and remind about uncertainties. Our case study shows that stakeholder-inclusive approaches using structured decision making and participatory modelling with professional facilitation are time- and planning-intensive, but can promote common system understanding and development of mutually agreed management advice also in heterogeneous stakeholder groups that are often in severe conflict with each other.

Scale decisions and good practices in socio-environmental systems modelling: guidance and documentation during problem scoping and model formulation

Models of socio-environmental or social-ecological systems (SES) commonly address problems requiring interdisciplinary scientific expertise and input from a heterogeneous group of stakeholders. In SES modelling multiple interactions occur on different scales among various phenomena. These scale phenomena include the technical, such as system variables, process detail, inputs and outputs, which most often require spatial, temporal, thematic and organisational choices. From a good practice and project efficiency perspective, the problem scoping and conceptual model formulation phase of modelling is the one to address well from the outset. During this phase, intense and substantive discussions should arise regarding appropriate scales at which to represent the different phenomena. Although the details of these discussions influence the path of model development, they are seldom documented and as a result often forgotten. We draw upon personal experience with existing protocols and communications in recent literature to propose preliminary guidelines for documenting these early discussions about the scale(s) of the studied phenomena. Our guidelines aim to aid modelling group members in building and capturing the richness of their rationale for scoping and scale decisions. The resulting transcripts are intended to promote transparency of modelling decisions and provide essential support for the justification of the final model for its intended use. They also facilitate adaptive modifications of the pathway of model development via retracing decisions and iterative reflection upon alternative scale options.

Ecosystem Services Assessment for the Conservation of Mangroves in French Guiana Using Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping

In 2016, the French government adopted a law for biodiversity, setting an objective of protecting 55,000 hectares of mangroves. This objective is particularly important to French Guiana, which shelters almost 60% of French mangrove ecosystems, and where mangroves occupy three quarters of the coastline. The coast of French Guiana is also where issues associated with demographic and economic dynamics concentrate. There is thus a need to plan for an economic development that is compatible with the objective of protecting mangrove ecosystems. Ecosystem services (ES) assessment can support such decision-making, informing on the costs and benefits associated with alternative mangrove conservation strategies. While the many services provided by mangrove ecosystems are well documented worldwide, the extent to which these can be encountered in the specific case of French Guiana is currently only very partially known. Relying on the Fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) approach, we collected and compared the perception of multiple and heterogeneous groups of stakeholders, of the functioning of the mangrove social-ecological system at the scale of French Guiana. Results, allow to identify mangroves ES and threats particularly influenced by the high sedimentary dynamism of the shoreline. This generates two distinct components of the mangrove social-ecological system: mud banks where ecosystem services are spatially and temporally unstable, and associated with perceived constraints for key coastal activities, and estuarine mangroves where the ecosystem services usually described in the literature on mangroves can be found. Disservices associated with mangrove ecosystems were also identified as a key interaction. This can inform the research needs that should support sustainable development trajectories, fully accounting for the protection of French Guianese mangrove ecosystems.

Webs of Influence: Secondary Stakeholder Actions and Cross-National Corporate Social Performance

We analyze the relationship between the actions and interactions of secondary stakeholders with an interest in corporate social performance (CSP) and variation in firm-level CSP across countries. Our work represents a significant theoretical shift in research exploring comparative CSP, which, to date, has focused on cross-national variation in institutions. We propose that stakeholders can also drive cross-country heterogeneity in CSP by influencing the salience of the issues for which they advocate. Stakeholders raise salience of CSP issues through their interactions with important sociopolitical actors within a country, signaling their collective ability to change expectations on CSP. CSP issue salience is also heightened where heterogeneous stakeholder groups advocate for CSP issues, signaling that issues have garnered widespread acceptance or legitimacy. Managers are also more attuned to the urgency of issues through the direct actions that stakeholders take against firms in the country. We also argue and find that these effects are moderated by interstakeholder interactions, which signal the degree of consensus among stakeholders on issues and their ability to mobilize repeatedly against firms. We draw on a novel data set of 250 million media-reported events to identify secondary stakeholders with interests in the environmental and social issues that constitute CSP, their direct actions against firms, and their interactions with important sociopolitical actors and each other. We show empirically that variation in secondary stakeholder actions and interactions between countries, and within countries over time, is associated with differences in firm-level CSP among a sample of 2,852 firms spanning 36 countries from 2004 to 2013.

Health System Stakeholders' Perspective on the Role of Mobile Health and Its Adoption in the Swiss Health System: Qualitative Study.

BackgroundDigital health solutions have great potential to change the way health care is delivered, including better clinical outcomes and improved processes and access to health services. However, the adoption of mobile health (mHealth) solutions for patient monitoring has been rather slow in Switzerland. The reasons are complex, and a better understanding is needed to leverage the full potential of mHealth.ObjectiveThis study aimed to deepen the understanding of the potential relevance and influence of mHealth for the health system and health care provision, and factors influencing its adoption. The findings will be used to provide an outlook on feasible recommendations for action.MethodsWe conducted a qualitative survey using a maximum variation sample of a heterogeneous group of stakeholders (N=50) in the Swiss health care system with a profound knowledge of digital health and medical devices. A semistructured interview guide including open- and closed-ended questions was used to address questions around mHealth relevance and its influence on the health system, the relevance of selected determinants for mHealth adoption, and important influencing factors. A content analysis method was applied.ResultsOverall, respondents thought that mHealth would have a beneficial impact on the Swiss health system but that its adoption would evolve slowly. We derived 23 key opportunities regarding patient and patient pathway, treatment of disease, and diseases and health conditions. High consistency in answers among respondents was observed for treatment of disease. Stakeholders’ attitudes toward mHealth adoption along the relevance of 23 preselected determinants were relatively consistent. However, we obtained diverging attitudes regarding the influence of trends, enablers, and restraints in Switzerland and translated them into 26 key themes influencing mHealth adoption. Relevant trends comprise changing needs and expectations of patients, a rising need for efficient health care delivery, growing interest in improved outpatient care, and emerging technologies and progressing digitization. Important enablers include growing demand for new financing schemes and incentive concepts, rising demand for comprehensive information on and stronger body of evidence for mHealth use cases, and increasing need for easy to use alternate care approaches. Challenging restraints are rigidness of thinking and siloed actions of health system actors, complexity of changing the existing regulations and structures, little understanding of mHealth use and the role of clinicians, and risk of further polarization of the population.ConclusionsThis study provides a comprehensive look at mHealth in the Swiss health system. It becomes apparent that strong governance is inevitable to foster a sustainable data strategy and to reconcile the different interests of stakeholders. The use of mHealth will add value but will not necessarily reduce the burden on the system caused by emerging societal needs and changing disease prevalence.

Conference Report The Second Tourism And Hospitality International Conference (Thic 2014)

Conference Report The Second Tourism And Hospitality International Conference (Thic 2014)

Assessing the impact of transdisciplinary research: The usefulness of relevance, credibility, and legitimacy for understanding the link between process and impact

There is a call for more transdisciplinary (TD) research, from academia, society, and funding agencies. Consequently, the field of TD research is searching for ways of proving the value and providing evidence to support the effectiveness of such research. The main challenge for evaluating TD research is attribution, that is how to link societal change to the TD research process. However, little attention has been paid to the relationship between the quality of the research process and the effects and impacts that are being evaluated. Building upon earlier attempts at evaluating TD research, this article tests three key aspects of effective sustainability research: its relevance, credibility, and legitimacy. To explore the link between the quality of process and societal effects, we analyze and compare outputs, outcomes, and impact of five TD projects. Overall, our analysis shows that while relevance, credibility, and legitimacy gave important insights regarding the links between process and impacts, they are not adequate for evaluating TD research impact. Process qualities such as practitioner motivation and perceived importance of the project, together with breadth of perspectives, the openness/flexibility of participants, and in-depth exchanges of expertise and knowledge, contributed to producing internally relevant, credible, and legitimate results. However, we also saw a need to develop the relevance, credibility, and legitimacy framework, in relation to the external dynamics of the project process, heterogeneous stakeholder groups, and the credibility of practice-based knowledge, which together with institutional factors and the political context significantly shape the possibility of impact.

Serialisation and the use of Twitter: Keeping the conversation alive in public policy scenario projects

Scenario planning projects have been used in a variety of organisational settings to explore future uncertainty. The scenario process is often a participative one involving heterogeneous stakeholder groups from multiple organisations, particularly when exploring issues of wider public concern. Facilitated workshops are a common setting for scenario projects, typically requiring people to be physically present in order to participate and engage with others for the duration of the project. During workshops, participants progress through the stages of the process, generating content relevant to each stage and ultimately the scenarios themselves. However, the periods between workshops and other episodes of activity (e.g. interviewing stakeholders) are rarely mentioned in such accounts. Thus we know very little about what activities take place between such activities, when they occur and who is involved. This is a particular issue for larger scale scenario projects that run over a period of weeks or months and involve multiple workshops; in such cases organisers and facilitators have to consider how to maintain the interest and levels of engagement of participants throughout the duration of the project. A variety of social media exist which allow people to interact with each other virtually, both in real time and asynchronously. We reflect on the use of social media within a project to develop scenarios for the future of the food system around Birmingham, UK, in the year 2050. We explore how a particular social media, namely Twitter, can be used effectively as part of a scenario planning project, for example to engage participants and encourage contributions to the project. We suggest that Twitter can support the serialisation of strategic conversations between the face-to-face workshops. The paper considers the implications of these reflections for both the scenario process and scenario projects more generally.

Modelling production system architectures in the early phases of product development

This article suggests a framework for modelling a production system architecture in the early phases of product development. The challenge in these phases is that the products to be produced are not completely defined and yet decisions need to be made early in the process on what investments are needed and appropriate to enable determination of obtainable product quality. In order to meet this challenge, it is suggested that a visual modelling framework be adopted that clarifies which product and production features are known at a specific time of the project and which features will be worked on – leading to an improved basis for prioritizing activities in the project. Requirements for the contents of the framework are presented, and literature on production and system models is reviewed. The production system architecture modelling framework is founded on methods and approaches in literature and adjusted to fit the modelling requirements of a production system architecture at an early phase of development. The production system architecture models capture and describe the structure, capabilities and expansions of the production system architecture under development. The production system architecture modelling framework is tested in a case study, and the results indicate that the modelling process facilitates identification of critical factors of the production system architecture, that the production system architecture models capture and describe the structure, capabilities and expansions of a production system architecture under development, and that the production system architecture models can facilitate dialogue on the production system architecture between heterogeneous stakeholder groups.

Social sustainability of cod and haddock fisheries in the northeast Atlantic: what issues are important?

Research on the sustainability of capture fisheries has focused more on environmental and economic sustainability than on social sustainability. To assess social sustainability, first relevant and important social sustainability issues need to be identified. The objective of this study was to identify relevant social sustainability issues for cod and haddock fisheries in the northeast Atlantic and to determine the importance of these issues based on stakeholder input. A heterogeneous group of stakeholders was invited to take part in two consecutive surveys on social sustainability issues. The first survey (n = 41) resulted in a long list of 27 relevant social sustainability issues, including six issues that were not identified in previous studies and that address aspects of fish welfare, employees' training and education opportunities, and employees' time off from work. The second survey (n = 51) resulted in a ranking of the social sustainability issues in order of importance. The most important issues are worker safety, product freshness and companies' salary levels. In general, social sustainability issues concerning working conditions, employees' job fulfilment and fish welfare are seen as more important than other social sustainability issues. A main discussion point concerns the relation between the importance of a social sustainability issue on the one hand and the type of need that the issue relates to and the state of the issue on the other hand. From the study it can be concluded that the relative importance of social sustainability issues differs per stakeholder group depending on the relation between the stakeholder group and each particular issue. This demonstrates the importance of consulting different stakeholder groups in future studies on social sustainability in order to get a balanced view on the importance of social sustainability issues. Results on the relevance and importance of social sustainability issues for cod and haddock fisheries in the northeast Atlantic enable the fishing industry and policy-makers to direct improvement efforts towards the more important issues.

Trade-offs in a Tempest: Stakeholder Influence on Hurricane Evacuation Decisions

Stakeholders often control vital resources for decision makers, and this can lead decision makers to take stakeholder opinions into account when making important decisions. This process can be complicated by a number of factors. First, many important decisions involve risk and uncertainty. When the outcome is uncertain, how does a decision maker take the views of stakeholders into account? Second, many decision makers are accountable to multiple different stakeholder groups with different preferences. How do these heterogeneous stakeholder groups affect the process of decision making? More generally, do these stakeholder considerations lead to decisions that are not socially optimal? We explore these and related questions by focusing on a specific type of high-stakes decision making in a context featuring significant risk and heterogeneous stakeholders—the decision to evacuate a community during the threat of a hurricane hitting land. There is research on weather forecasting techniques and individual evacuation behavior; however, there is no research on the behavior of local officials in making hurricane evacuation decisions. These decisions provide an excellent context for an exploration into the specific processes by which stakeholder considerations may affect the process of decision making. This study offers a simple model of the process underlying evacuation decision making. The model focuses on how the evacuation threshold is set based on the anticipated costs of Type I versus Type II errors. We then use the model—supplemented with rich qualitative and quantitative data—to offer a series of propositions about the conditions under which nonsocially optimal evacuation decisions may be made. This paper contributes to the literature on decision making by offering a simple model that integrates decision making and stakeholder considerations and by offering specific and novel propositions about this integration.

Identifying Sustainability Issues for Soymeal and Beef Production Chains

The expansion of livestock production throughout the world has led to increased demand for high protein animal feed. This expansion has created economic benefits for livestock farmers and other actors in the chain, but also resulted in environmental and social side effects. This study aims to identify a set of sustainability issues that cover the environmental, economic and social dimensions of soymeal and beef production chains. The method applied combines the results of multiple studies, including a literature review and stakeholder surveys. Stakeholder surveys were conducted for three different interest groups (business, consumers, and other stakeholders) and two geographical regions (Latin America and the European Union). Our results reveal that the selection of issues in most sustainability assessment studies is a relatively arbitrary decision, while the literature also states that identifying issues is an important step in a sustainability assessment. Defining sustainability issues from a whole chain perspective is important, as issues of sustainability emerge at various stages along the production chain, and are found to vary across stakeholders’ interests. Business stakeholders, for example, perceived economic issues to be more important, whereas the majority of consumer stakeholders and other stakeholders perceived social and environmental issues, respectively, to be more important. Different education levels, knowledge, and living patterns in various geographical regions can affect the stakeholders’ perceptions. The combination of a heterogeneous group of stakeholders and the consideration of multiple chain stages constitutes a useful approach to identify sustainability issues along food chains.

Grounding Ontologies with Social Processes and Natural Language

Ontologies for enabling semantic interoperability is one of the branches in which agreement between a heterogeneous group of stakeholders is of vital importance. As agreements are the result of interactions, appropriate methods should take into account the natural language used by the community during those interactions. In this article, we first extend a fact-oriented formalism for the construction of so-called hybrid ontologies. In hybrid ontologies, concepts are described both formally and informally and the agreements are being grounded in community interactions. We furthermore present GOSPL, a collaborative ontology engineering method on top of this extension and describe how agreements on formal and informal descriptions are complementary and interplay. We show how the informal descriptions can drive the ontology construction process and how commitments from the ontology to the application are exploited to steer the agreement processes. All of the ideas presented in this article have been implemented in a tool and used in an experiment involving 40+ users, of which a discussion is presented.

Hybrid modeling and simulation for trustworthy software process management: a stakeholder‐oriented approach

SUMMARYProcess Management Model (PMM) and Process Simulation Model (PSM) are the critical infrastructural components of the Trustworthy Process Management Framework (TPMF), which involves a large and heterogeneous group of stakeholders in process modeling and simulation to improve process trustworthiness. Process Modeling Stakeholders (PMS) have different levels of dependency on various process modeling and simulation techniques. They may also possess different perspectives or concerns in modeling. To support trustworthy process management, this paper integrates the stakeholder‐oriented approach and hybrid simulation technique into software process modeling at three levels of abstraction (i.e., activity, sub‐process and system). The hybrid process simulation combines micro‐level discrete process models with the macro‐level continuous process models to capture process dynamics. In particular, the stakeholder‐oriented approach addresses the various perspectives of PMS during process modeling and simulation. Finally, a case study with a realistic process model demonstrates that this approach incrementally integrates stakeholders' modeling concerns through hybrid simulation, which is difficult to achieve using discrete or continuous modeling/simulation techniques independently. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Scenario method and stakeholder engagement: Critical reflections on a climate change scenarios case study

Scenario method is presented in the literature as a means for engaging heterogeneous stakeholder groups to explore climate change futures and to inform policy and planning for adaptation responses. We discuss a case study project investigating possible interactions between climate change impacts and a proposed major port expansion in Australia. The study engaged participants from the private sector, government and environmental groups, with input from college students from the local area. Semi-structured interviews and a scenario workshop were employed, creating individual space for expression of ideas, then a collaborative space for sharing these, exploring differences of perception and meaning, and developing a set of possible and plausible scenarios. Whilst the workshop resulted in consensus on key issues and proposed actions, intended to inform policy formation and planning, there was an unforeseen lack of short term follow up and of the groups working more closely together. We discuss the reasons for this through reflective critical analysis of both our own process and of contingent factors in the wider contextual environment. We conclude that the basic scenario approach is valuable, but does not itself act as a catalyst for effecting change when multiple agencies, interests and agendas and strong contingent factors are present.

Collaborative prioritization of architectural concerns

Efficient architecture work involves balancing the degree of architecture documentation with attention to needs, costs, agility and other factors. This paper presents a method for prioritizing architectural concerns in the presence of heterogeneous stakeholder groups in large organizations that need to evolve existing architecture. The method involves enquiry, analysis, and deliberation using collaborative and analytical techniques. Method outcomes are action principles directed to managers, and assessment of user needs directed to architects, along with evidence. The method results from 4 years of action research at Ericsson AB with the purpose of adding missing views to architecture documentation and removing superfluous ones. It is illustrated on a case where 29 senior engineers and managers within Ericsson prioritized 37 architectural concerns areas to arrive at 8 action principles, 5 prioritized improvement areas, and 24 improvement suggestions. Feedback from the organization is that the method has been effective in prioritizing architectural concerns, that data collection and analysis is more extensive compared to traditional prioritization practices, but that extensive analysis seems inevitable in architecture improvement work.