Stakeholders

Stakeholders are groups of people, organisms, and individuals who are affected by or may have an effect on environmental issues, whether directly or indirectly (Mitchell et al. 856).

According to Emmet and Nye, the role of stakeholders is to collaborate on “questions of ethics, politics, culture, and policy” to come to a consensus on a course of action (38).

As stakeholders represent a wide variety of interests, the term can be broken down into four main categories describing the motives of one’s involvement- risk losers, risk gainers, risk perpetrators, and risk managers (English 249-250). Risk losers are most often the ordinary people fighting against potentially harmful actions, not only to the environment but to their personal lives, generally in terms of health, economics, or religion. The gain for risk gainers is frequently economic, such as profits gained by property owners selling their land to a large company with plans to put in a an environmentally detrimental factory. In this scenario, the risk perpetrator would be the large company, and the risk managers would be local, state, or federal government officials performing Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) or other regulatory investigations (English 250).

Every case study of stakeholders in environmental issues is highly dependent on the scale of the potential impact. Involvement at the local level has a drastically different appearance from at the state or especially the country level. At its most extreme level, conflicts with international environmental consequences draw every person, organism, and institution into the discussion, making us all stakeholders in our collective fate (Aloni et al. 2015).

 

Works Cited

Aloni C., Daminabo I., Alexander B. C., and M.T. Bakpo. “The Importance of Stakeholders Involvement in Environmental Impact Assessment.” Resources and Environment, vol. 5, no. 5, 2015, pp. 146-151.

Emmett, Robert S., and David E. Nye. “Place, Ecotourism, and the New Wilds.” The Environmental Humanities : A Critical Introduction, MIT Press, 2017. pp. 23-46.

English, Mary R. “Who Are the Stakeholders in Environmental Risk Decisions – How Should They Be Involved.” RISK: Health, Safety & Environment, vol. 11, no. 3, 2000, pp. 243-254.

Mitchell, Ronald K., Agle, Bradley R., and Donna J. Wood. “Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of Who and What Really Counts.” The Academy of Management Review, vol. 22, no. 4, 1997, pp. 853-886.