Abstract
It is widely recognized that stakeholder engagement can lead to improved decision making. However, decision makers must identify and engage appropriate stakeholder groups. This can be challenging when there is a wide and diverse range of potential stakeholders, often the case in environmental management. Some fields, business and public relations for example, have proposed criteria or methodologies for prioritizing stakeholders for inclusion in decision making, but current methods of stakeholder evaluation in environmental management focus on stakeholder identification, categorization, and relationship analysis, none of which explicitly prioritize stakeholders. In this paper we propose a set of ten criteria, drawn from the literature, that can be used to prioritize stakeholders for environmental management decision making. These criteria are: level of interest, level of influence, magnitude of impact, probability of impact, urgency/temporal immediacy, proximity, economic interest, rights, fairness, and underrepresented/underserved populations. Not all criteria will be relevant to all decision makers, but we suggest this set of criteria encompasses those stakeholder engagement factors most commonly considered by decision makers. This paper proposes these criteria that form the basis of future decision support approaches in environmental management contexts and we argue for development and testing of these criteria to connect stakeholder prioritization and environmental decision making.