Stakeholder Politics Research Articles

African Archaeological Journals and Social Issues 2014–2021

The two waves of reflexivity in archaeology are the identity politics of archaeologists and stakeholder politics. These social issues are considered in this article through the perspective of three African archaeological journals produced from 2014 to 2021. Identity politics is examined through a quantitative analysis of authorship, book reviewing, and the countries covered. I conclude that parity of gender authorship—assuming 61% male and 39% female archaeologists—has been achieved by the African Archaeological Review, Journal of African Archaeology, and Azania. In book reviewing, this is less so. The geographical coverage across the three journals shows lacunae. Stakeholder politics is most visible in book reviews and special issues. Journal ethics and goals and the final topics of open access and other ways of broadening the pool of authors, reviewers, and accessibility are offered.

Adapting scenarios for climate adaptation: Practitioners’ perspectives on a popular planning method

Scenario planning is a popular decision-support method that is increasingly being applied to climate change adaptation. However, evaluation of scenario planning for adaptation is lacking. In this paper we summarise a science-policy session held at the European Climate Change Adaptation Conference in May 2019, where practitioners explored the strengths and weaknesses of scenario planning for climate adaptation and identified modifications to enhance the method’s utility. Eight case studies spanning three scenario planning types (problem-focused, actor-focused and reflexive-interventionist) from varied socio-cultural contexts were presented by the authors, followed by discussion amongst the 40 participants. Strengths focussed on opportunities provided by scenario planning for stakeholder participation, and raising their awareness about future risks, vulnerability and uncertainty. Participatory scenario planning was most useful for building stakeholder consensus at the local scale (e.g. communities, neighbourhoods) over shorter timeframes (e.g. 20 years). Weaknesses centred on the inability of scenarios to generate quantitative predictions and concrete adaptation solutions. This was partly attributed to practitioners’ limited understanding of stakeholder politics and power dynamics, and the resulting lack of integration of scenario exercises within decision-making processes. Scenarios were also limited by being static, and participatory processes were resource-intensive. Suggested modifications were to develop iterative scenario planning embedded within decision-making cycles. Such ‘transient scenarios’ could absorb system feedbacks and updated information to prioritise adaptation responses, thus actively contributing to ongoing adaptation pathways. Applying monitoring, evaluating and learning would enable reflexive refinement of the method, adapting it to become an agile approach applicable to varied socio-cultural and political contexts.

How Scandals Act as Catalysts of Fringe Stakeholders’ Contentious Actions Against Multinational Corporations

In this article, we build on the stakeholder-politics literature to investigate how corporate scandals transform political contexts and give impetus to the contentious movements of fringe stakeholders against multinational corporations (MNCs). Based on Adut’s scandal theory, we flesh out three scandal-related processes that directly affect political-opportunity structures (POSs) and the generation of social movements against MNCs: convergence of contention toward a single target, publicization of deviant practices, and contagion to other organizations. These processes reduce the obstacles to collective actions by fringe stakeholders by pushing corporate elites to be more sensitive to their claims, by decreasing MNCs’ capability to repress contentious movements, by forcing the targeted MNCs to formalize a policy to monitor and eradicate the controversial practices, and by helping fringe stakeholders find internal and external allies to support their claims. This conceptual model of scandals as catalysts of contentious actions contributes to a better understanding of stakeholder politics by unveiling the role of the political context in the coordination of fringe stakeholders.

Natural resource rent and stakeholder politics in Africa: towards a new conceptualisation

This paper critically revisits the debate on natural resource rent, curse and conflict, interrogating some of the key assumptions that have become received knowledge in extant discourses. The paper demonstrates how orthodox theories’ preoccupation with issues of resource rent and resource curse tend to be marred by slants of ahistoricity and state-centricity. Adopting a stakeholder approach to the issues of resource rent and conflict in Africa, the author argues that natural resource rents produce and attract a multiplicity of competitive stakeholders, both domestic and external, in the resource-rich states. The competition and jostling of stakeholders for access to, and appropriation of, rentier resources is too often an antagonistic process in many emerging economies that has consequences and implications for violent conflict. The paper attempts a new conceptual explanation of how natural resource rents dialectically generate stakes, stakeholders and political conflict. The paper concludes by proposing the need for the more conflict-prone African rentier states to transition to a more functional state model, the transformative state.

Formalizing Informality: The Stakeholder Politics of Clawbacks

Stakeholder management focuses on mutualism and competition within cohorts of stakeholders, but conflicts also occur between stakeholders who are connected to a firm at different times. This paper describes the process through which inter-cohort stakeholder conflicts arise: unobserved behavior leads to inaccurate valuations of organizational activities and earlier stakeholders benefit at the expense of later cohorts. Latency in the observation of impropriety motivates dysfunction by compensating actions that are inconsistent with the long-term interests of the firm or its stakeholders. One solution is to accept that historical calculations of risk and reward will often be inaccurate, and to settle accounts later by taking back ill-gotten gains. This is the practical spirit of the legal innovation known as clawbacks, found in bankruptcy proceedings and in compensation contracts. Relying upon these innovations to theorize an alternative system of governance, this paper considers how an economy of traceable ...

Evaluating Development Interventions in Peace-Precarious Situations

International development assistance tackles sociopolitical and socioeconomic problems, typically with formal host government and population buy-in (or acquiescence), in settings with complex interrelated challenges. A new subset of contemporary interventions, however, faces all of the usual development challenges plus security threats affecting foreign and local staff, host country leadership, and local counterparts necessary for generating sustainable improvements. Threats can arise as a function of individuals’ roles in promoting development. Evaluations of the results of development interventions in peace-precarious situations not only confront the same extra challenges implementation does in these settings, but must also account for the consequences of a panoply of interactive intangibles, shifting dynamically over time. Salient contextual features shaping feasible and useful approaches to evaluation in peace-precarious situations include adherence to management and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems; elasticity in design and resources; and dynamics of stakeholder politics and broader political relationships.

Book Review: The Business Case for Sustainability, A review of Stakeholder Politics: Social Capital, Sustainable Development, and the Corporation

Sustainability: The Journal of RecordVol. 2, No. 4 Book Review: The Business Case for Sustainability, A review of Stakeholder Politics: Social Capital, Sustainable Development, and the CorporationPublished Online:28 Aug 2009https://doi.org/10.1089/SUS.2009.9850AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail "Book Review: The Business Case for Sustainability, A review of Stakeholder Politics: Social Capital, Sustainable Development, and the Corporation." , 2(4), pp. 250–251FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 2Issue 4Aug 2009 Information©2009 by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.To cite this article:Book Review: The Business Case for Sustainability, A review of Stakeholder Politics: Social Capital, Sustainable Development, and the Corporation.Sustainability.Aug 2009.250-251.http://doi.org/10.1089/SUS.2009.9850Published in Volume: 2 Issue 4: August 28, 2009PDF download

The Politics of Smoking in Federal Buildings: An Executive Order Case Study

Executive orders are important presidential tools for health policymaking that are subject to less public scrutiny than are legislation and regulatory rulemaking. President Bill Clinton banned smoking in federal government buildings by executive order in 1997, after the administration of George H. W. Bush had twice considered and abandoned a similar policy. The 1991 and 1993 Bush proposals drew objections from agency heads and labor unions, many coordinated by the tobacco industry. We analyzed internal tobacco industry documents and found that the industry engaged in extensive executive branch lobbying and other political activity surrounding the Clinton smoking ban. Whereas some level of stakeholder politics might have been expected, this policy also featured jockeying among various agencies and the participation of organized labor.

Who Gets to Decide? The Role of Institutional Logics in Shaping Stakeholder Politics and Insurgency

Who Gets to Decide? The Role of Institutional Logics in Shaping Stakeholder Politics and Insurgency

Mobilising ‘Community’ for Justice in District Six: Stakeholder Politics Early in the Land Restitution Process

Is justice administration in the context of land restitution in urban South Africa best achieved through a welfarist and developmentalist approach, or through an egalitarian approach based on individual rights? This dilemma is built into the Restitution of Land Rights Act through the inclusion of Section 34, in terms of which government bodies can apply to preclude an individual claims process in favour of a state-controlled development project designed 'in the public interest'.

The real stakes of virtual publishing: The transformation of E‐Biomed into PubMed central

AbstractIn May 1999, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Harold Varmus proposed an electronic repository for biomedical research literature server called “E‐biomed.” E‐biomed reflected the visions of scholarly electronic publishing advocates: It would be fully searchable, be free to readers, and contain full‐text versions of both preprint and postpublication biomedical research articles. However, within 4 months, the E‐biomed proposal was radically transformed: The preprint section was eliminated, delays were instituted between article publication and posting to the archive, and the name was changed to “PubMed Central.” This case study examines the remarkable transformation of the E‐biomed proposal to PubMed Central by analyzing comments about the proposal that were posted to an online E‐biomed forum created by the NIH, and discussions that took place in other face‐to‐face forums where E‐biomed deliberations took place. We find that the transformation of the E‐biomed proposal into PubMed Central was the result of highly visible and highly influential position statements made by scientific societies against the proposal. The literature about scholarly electronic publishing usually emphasizes a binary conflict between (trade) publishers and scholars/scientists. We conclude that: (1) scientific societies and the individual scientists they represent do not always have identical interests in regard to scientific e‐publishing; (2) stakeholder politics and personal interests reign supreme in e‐publishing debates, even in a supposedly status‐free online forum; and (3) multiple communication forums must be considered in examinations of e‐publishing deliberations.

Stakeholders and Senates: the governance of higher education institutions in South Africa

> This article investigates the issue of the governance of higher education institutions and argues that governance by Senates is more appropriate than governance by stakeholders for such institutions. It discusses the ambiguous democratic credentials of stakeholder politics and argues against this mode of politics in the governance of higher education institutions, especially in respect to their ‘transformation’. In terms of distinctions between convergent and shared interests, service and constitutive institutions and the essential lack of transparency of academic practices, it argues that higher education institutions should be governed by the body of accomplished academics. The conclusion is not that Senates cannot be corrupt, but that to substitute governance by stakeholders for governance by Senates cannot solve that problem.

Management and Four Stakeholder Politics

The concept of corporate reengineering provides a rich opportunity to consider certain political implications of using the stakeholder concept. By showing the ethical incoherence of corporate reengineering, as the concept is advocated by Michael Hammer and James Champy, I make the point that the stakeholder concept can be interpreted as a means for advocating just human communities. A new conception of Business & Society as Community Studies is one consequence of this argument.

Untangling the Gordian knot: bridging instrumental rationality and stakeholder politics in the evaluation of public policies

The web of public policy design and implementation in Canada is likened to the Gordian knot, which ties together the specific use of instruments and stakeholder politics. Two analytical frameworks are presented which offer great potential for untangling the knot — the instruments approach and Lundquist's concept of stakeholder politics. There is an urgent need for a ‘transdisciplinary’ approach to evaluation. Policy evaluators will have to use concepts and develop applications drawn from different disciplines. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.