The concept of stakeholders applied to natural resources: human-wildlife coexistence as a case study

Efforts towards a sustainable management of natural resources should integrate society’s concerns and expectations (Kessler et al., 1992) by shifting the perspective on decision-making processes from mere interest-based participation towards collective feelings of responsibility, care, and legitimacy regarding both individuals’ and communities’ roles and rights (Brosius et al., 1998). It has already been argued that utilising the original attributes of property and action (Mitchell et al., 1997) to decide whose economic “stake” is relevant enough to be considered a “stakeholder” can undermine the democratic management of natural resources by facilitating the prioritisation of certain people’s interests over others’ (Matulis, 2014). Moreover, even the definition of the interest itself is still up for debate, with both policymakers and academics arguing in favour or against the inclusion of values other than the strictly economic ones (Pearce, 1989). Thus, we decided to analyse the evolution of the stakeholder concept using the scientific literature on human-wildlife conflicts as a case study, since wildlife is an emblematic example of a good with both consumptive and non-consumptive values, to catalogue the interpretations of “stake” adopted by academia and how they directly influence the identification and involvement of people. Our main assumptions concern, first of all, the relation between the categories of stakeholders and the geographical and socio-economic context, and, most importantly, the theoretical transformation of the concept itself, morphing from a discipline–specific term used in business management (Freeman, 1984) to an ever–present buzzword with general agreement on the abstract notion it represents but unresolved disagreement about its practical application (Cornwall, 2010). Indeed, at present, no unambiguous definition of stakeholders in relation to natural resources exists. By discussing the semantic progress observed in the literature, we hope to highlight the need for a definitive cementation of the concept, with well-established and codified criteria to ensure transparent and objective decision-making processes. A scoping review was performed following the protocol defined by Hagen-Zanker and Mallet (2013) and the PRISMA-ScR guidelines (Tricco et al., 2018). Starting from 1,794 records, two screenings were performed following specific criteria. Descriptive statistics of the use of the word “stakeholder”, stakeholder categories, geographical locations, protection status of the study area, wildlife, type of conflict, and mitigation strategies were performed on 136 papers using IBM SPSS Statistics 29.0.1.0. The term “stakeholders” was used on average 21 times per paper, with a maximum of 145 times and a minimum of 1, up to ten times more often in the main body of the articles than the abstract and twenty times more than keywords and title. Fig. N 1 represents the frequencies in the papers and the relative sections. Figure N 1 – Trends in the use of the word “stakeholder” (I) The peak in 2015, corresponding to 69 times on average among three papers, is due to the overzealous use of the term in two of them (115 and 84 times) that have no similarities in terms of authorship, study area, methodology, or any other characteristics. The use of the term across the continents followed non-linear trends, with peaks and valleys alternating with intervals different in both number and duration, comparing, for example, Europe and America, and periods during which no use was recorded, like for Oceania and Africa (Fig. N 2). Figure N 2 – Trends in the use of the word “stakeholder” (II) Only 48 of the 136 papers included an explicit definition of “stakeholders”, ranging from a simple clarification of the type of economic interest held by the identified categories to complex and references-rich paragraphs debating the meaning of “stake” in that specific context, with one even including the animals themselves. Studies conducted in Europe and America both contained more definitions than the other continents combined. Noteworthy is also the fact that the majority of them were concentrated in papers published from 2011 on, possibly indicating the need to reiterate the meaning of the term after a period in which it had been taken for granted after being absorbed in the lexicon, or, more coherently with recent developments in wildlife management, to explicitly express values other than the canonical ones. A detailed textual analysis, including word frequencies and associations, will be performed following a rigorous protocol (drawing inspiration from the works of Di Bona et al., 2023 and Hallberg and Salimi, 2020) to measure the definitions’ semantic distance from Freeman’s. Africa America Asia Europe Oceania Stakeholder categories N of papers N of subjects N of papers N of subjects N of papers N of subjects N of papers N of subjects N of papers N of subjects Total papers Total subjects Activists 9 429 15 39 4 19 20 618 3 20 51 1125 Animals 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 Crop farmers 6 115 11 1230 3 483 13 1990 0 0 33 3818 Hunters/fishers 5 1241 20 1960 3 611 24 2394 4 46 56 6252 International authorities 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 Land/wildlife managers 8 47 23 77 2 35 20 991 5 48 58 1198 Landowners 1 597 7 11 2 918 11 847 1 0 22 2373 Livestock/fish farmers 6 108 18 757 3 24 17 676 3 32 47 1597 Local authorities 3 6 13 41 1 4 12 19 3 0 32 70 Rural areas' residents 10 1163 29 5691 6 1018 18 4089 3 126 66 12087 National authorities 5 27 12 15 1 0 12 20 1 0 31 62 Native Peoples 1 0 5 155 2 292 3 26 0 0 11 473 Policymakers 1 0 2 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 5 1 Scientists/researchers 2 2 10 24 2 12 7 28 2 0 23 66 Tourism professionals 4 42 5 8 1 3 5 72 4 23 19 148 Tourists/recreationists 3 26 7 2531 0 0 2 443 0 0 12 3000 Urban residents 1 1608 12 3605 2 0 8 1977 0 0 23 7190 TOTAL 65 5411 189 16145 33 3419 175 14190 29 295 491 39460 Overall, 17 categories of stakeholders were identified, summarised in Tab. N 1. Table N 1 - Frequency of involvement in the studies and sample size of the stakeholder categories   Globally, rural residents were the most considered stakeholders, with 12,087 (31%) subjects, followed by urban residents, with 7,190 (18%) individuals (23), and hunters and fishers, with 6,252 (16%) subjects. The least featured stakeholders were scientists/researchers and national authorities, with only 66 and 62 (>1%) subjects. In terms of collective sample size, urban residents (1,608) and hunters (1,241) predominated in Africa, parallel to rural (5,691) and urban (3,605) residents in America, rural residents (1,018) and landowners (918) in Asia, rural residents (4,089) and hunters (2,394) in Europe, and rural residents (126) and land managers (48) in Oceania. Fig. N 3 represents the changes in sample size for each category. Figure N 3 – Involvement of the different stakeholders. Given the ongoing status of the study, we were able to draw only some preliminary considerations. First of all, the inclusion of categories like policymakers and academics in the last 25 years’ literature already shows a tacit evolution of the concept towards a less strictly economic meaning, de facto considering other aspects, or at least straying from the fixed attributes of damage/financial gain. Secondly, both time and geographical location appear to significantly influence the types of subjects identified, due, on one hand, to the social, economic, environmental, and political peculiarities of each conflict hotspot, and, on the other hand, to the current debate on the stakeholder theory. Further analyses will be performed to understand the effect of location, protection status of the study area, wildlife, type of conflict, and mitigation strategy on stakeholders’ involvement. The primary aim of this research is to establish if the term “stakeholder” is still the most appropriate for the context of natural resources management, given that some alternatives have already been proposed (Decker et al., 2019), at the same time contributing to the discourse about the long-term repercussions of appropriating a specific discipline’s lexicon into the common language and the risk of scientific terminology becoming a buzzword.   References Brosius, J. P., Tsing, A. L., & Zerner, C. (1998). Representing communities: Histories and politics of community‐based natural resource management. Cornwall, A. (2010). Introductory overview–buzzwords and fuzzwords: deconstructing development discourse. Deconstructing Development Discourse, 1, 1-18. Decker, D.J., Forstchen, A.B., Siemer, W.F., Smith, C.A., Frohlich, R.K., Schiavone, M.V., Lederle, P.E. and Pomeranz, E.F. (2019). Moving the paradigm from stakeholders to beneficiaries in wildlife management. Jour. Wild. 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