Staking a claim : the role of stakeholders in government

Abstract

The stakeholder approach which emerged under the auspices of new public management has
been in use in public agencies for the past 25 years. However it remains a difficult and
demanding task for agencies to determine who their stakeholders are and how to optimise
interactions with them.
This paper will examine how government agencies identify, classify and engage with
stakeholders who have competing demands, differing access to resources and the ability to exert
political pressure. To do this, the stakeholder approaches of nine agencies at three levels of
government in Queensland were studied.
The contribution of this paper is the development of a Stakeholder Classification Model for
Public Agencies which could be used to create more focused and relevant stakeholder
interventions.