Understanding stakeholder relationships in sustainable brownfield regeneration: a combined FAHP and SNA approach

Systematic and comprehensive understanding of stakeholder relationships is the key component for achieving social sustainability of brownfield regeneration (BR), which has not been recognized by existing researches. Based on the widely acknowledged idea of social networks, this paper proposes a systematic research framework for the analysis of stakeholder relationships, with a focus on the dynamic and networked nature of relationships. The relationship network of stakeholders in BR is considered from three aspects: identifying the stakeholders and relationships among them, quantifying stakeholder relationships, and analyzing relationships network structure. The proposed stakeholder relationships analysis framework uses empirical methods (i.e., interviews and surveys), rationalistic methods (i.e., fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and social network analysis (SNA)) to analyze stakeholder relationships. To demonstrate the usability of the proposed framework, we apply it to the BR in China. The results show that: (1) it is feasible to mine the relationships of stakeholders from the social network perspective; (2) from the individual network aspect, the government, developers, government are at the core of the network with the highest network centrality during the recycling and contamination treatment stage, the construction stage and the use stage, respectively; (3) from the local network aspect, different cohesive subgroups with strong linkages are formed throughout the life cycle of BR; (4) from the overall network aspect, the highest density of the use stage means that there is good cohesion among stakeholders at this stage; the centralization of the construction stage is the highest, indicating that the stakeholders have relatively concentrated network power and loose relationships. The paper puts forward suggestions for improving the network structure of stakeholder relationships, including strengthening the network relationship between the government and environmental non-government organizations (ENGOs), improving the monitoring efficiency and network status of news media, establishing a construction consulting platform that effectively serves the public and end-users, forming the alliances among end-users, the public and ENGOs and enhancing the relationship network stability. Overall, this study helps to clarify stakeholder relationships by providing a systematic framework to encourage better stakeholder engagement.