The Future of Meaningful Stakeholder Engagement: Integrating Values, Norms and Practices

Pressures are mounting for more processes of meaningful engagement with affected stakeholders, i.e. those who are, or may be at risk of, being affected by activities such as natural resource extraction or processing, infrastructure, production of products for industry or consumption, or other activities driven by external actors. Over the past decades, and particularly in recent years, the term meaningful stakeholder engagement (MSE) has come to be deployed with a particular emphasis on affected stakeholders, referring to processes that try to ensure that their views, concerns, and needs are identified, understood, and handled in a manner that is inclusive of them and driven by their perspectives. As noted in the Introduction (Buhmann et al. 2024), rights-holders are stakeholders who may also be ‘affected stakeholders’, but not all stakeholders are rights-holders. Affected stakeholders may be individuals as well as groups, such as communities who are connected by living in a common place and are therefore jointly (but not necessarily similarly) affected by certain external impacts, such as environmental harm or disturbances to the community fabric.