Students:Final outcome of student stakeholder mapping and analysis in the Ore Mountains

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Ore Mountains sustainability case study: actor analysis

The following is an analysis of actors involved or affected in some way by lignite mining in the northern Ore Mountains in the vicinity of the Czechoslovak Army and Vršany opencast coal mines operated by Czech Coal and relating to their influence on the economic, social and environmental life of the region. The analysis is the result of work undertaken by students who attended the international Interdisciplinary Study Programme on Sustainability (ISPoS) summer school in the first week of September 2012. The actor analysis methodology used was based upon the stakeholder analysis tools contained in Zimmermann, A., Maennling, C. (2007)[1].

A map of regional actors was produced by identifying those most relevant, interviewing them during site visits and excursions (methodological instructions used), and analysing their relationships to one another and then depicting these in diagrammatic form. In addition to representing the key actors, the diagram includes those stakeholders who interact with them or who have an influence on them (primary and secondary stakeholders). The diagram provided a general overview of all stakeholders and allowed students to make some initial observations and hypotheses about the various kinds of influence the stakeholders have on the issue of lignite mining and the potential for proposing some type of reform intervention, as well as about the relationships and mutual dependencies. Students were able to draw conclusions regarding alliances, problematic relationships among stakeholders and their power relations.

Generally speaking, although the students did not have sufficient time to make a detailed study of the regional stakeholders and their relationships, the students nevertheless also uncovered gaps in information and areas of insufficient participation among actors. It showed which stakeholders and relationships students knew little about and about whom they required more information, and which actors should definitely be included in any proposed intervention.

Regional Actors

Following several days of visits to various localities of importance to the issue of lignite mining in the northern Ore Mountains and several face-to-face meetings with significant local actors, the students constructed a list of the following stakeholders, dividing them up into core actors (the most important), primary actors (less important) and secondary actors (with marginal impact on issues at stake only):

Core actors

  • National government
  • Regional government
  • Mining companies
  • Local businesses
  • Environmental NGOS
  • The communities of Horní Jiřetín and Černice (as they lie directly in the path of proposed new mining operations)

Primary actors

  • Municipal government
  • Wider community citizens
  • Schools
  • Heavy industry
  • Property owners
  • Cultural NGOs
  • Health care services
  • European Union

Secondary actors

  • Media
  • Academic and lay experts

All these stakeholders were depicted in concentric circles placing the three pillars of sustainable development in the centre, followed by the core actors and then the primary and secondary actors, as seen in Fig. 1.

Mapping of stakeholder relationships and interactions

The next step was to analyse the various interactions and highlighting the different relationships between all the stakeholders. This creates what at first sight seems like a somewhat complicated map (see Fig. 2), even without every single interaction depicted, yet a closer reading revealed an elegant simplicity to the map which was able to be simplified further to demonstrate (see Fig. 3) the most critical relationships with the greatest impact on the region’s development.

The first stage of the map involved mapping the obvious relationships and networking among specific stakeholders and briefly listing what their particular interest might be in that relationship. Examples (by no means exhaustive) were as follows:

  • The national government interacts with the European Union, the regional government and Czech Coal in respect to formulating strategic national and regional resource plans, analysing and negotiating energy security needs, setting a democratic framework for communicating and decision-making, defining the legal framework for resource exploitation
  • Czech Coal interacts with heavy industries and local businesses to ensure on-going supplies of coal as a source of energy for manufacturing processes or as purchasers of each other’s goods and services; Czech Coal also has problematic or broken relationships with the communities of Horní Jiřetín and Černice and some property owners because of continuing uncertainty over the future of those townships and surrounding land with the prospect of further mining operations hanging over them; there is a similar broken relationship with some environmental and cultural NGOs because of diametrically opposed views on future use of the landscape and preservation of the built environment
  • Local businesses have a symbiotic relationship with the regional citizens, as the former act as sources of employment for the latter, while citizens are purchasers of business services and goods; Czech Coal also interacts with citizens as another important source of employment and as sponsors and funders of local community projects, e.g. cultural and sporting events
  • Environmental NGOS interact with Horní Jiřetín and Černice in support of the efforts of those communities to protect their existing natural and built environment and cultural monuments, and to inform other regional citizens, while they also seek to influence the opinions of politicians at the local, regional and national government level; environmental and cultural NGOs further interact with academic experts as partners or funders of independent research on local environmental impacts
  • Municipal government naturally has a relationship with its local citizens as a provider of basic and public services, and with schools as the official employers of the teaching staff, while schools in turn interact with the national government in terms of curriculum setting, and with experts in the form of pedagogues researching and testing teaching methodology
  • Health care services interact with the national and regional governments as recipients of funding for their services, and with experts as primary sources of research into the general health of the local population, including the impact of particulates in the atmosphere resulting from opencast mineral extraction; they naturally also have a strong relationship toward the local citizens as providers of primary health care
  • The European Union has a relationship toward the national and regional governments in terms of creating an overarching European framework for environmental protection, maintaining a common market for the mineral and energy projects produced by the region, guidelines for mineral extraction and provision of funding for infrastructural projects
  • The media interact with the local citizens as conduits, filters or even interpreters of information about regional sustainability impacts, while also interacting with all other stakeholders to source their information


References

  1. Zimmermann, A., Maennling, C. (2007). Mainstreaming participation, Multi-stakeholder management: tools for stakeholder analysis, 10 building blocks for designing participatory systems of cooperation. From the series: Promoting participatory development in German development cooperation. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH. Available from: http://www.fsnnetwork.org/sites/default/files/en-svmp-instrumente-akteuersanalyse.pdf