Who are the resident stakeholders in a flood project? A spatial analysis of resident stakeholders

The importance of public participation has been discussed and well understood for some time, and many people have moved beyond the development of ideas to putting them into practice. During the past few years, stakeholder theory, one of the most popular theories originating from the field of business management, has been attracting immense attention due to its utility in raising representativeness in government. For instance, Hemmati (Multi-stakeholder process for governance and sustainability: beyond deadlock and conflict. Earthscan, London, 2002 ) argued that multi-stakeholder processes (MSPs) might be effective methods toward generating better policy options under the current democratic paradigm. In real life, however, stakeholder theory often has not been appropriately adopted in the field of environmental management. Sometimes, planners, prompted by the difficulty of identifying stakes, have used the term “stakeholders” as roughly synonymous with “participants”, thus impairing the content of stakeholder theory. Different from previous work in the field of flood management, we propose an original approach, the spatial analysis of a flood project for resident stakeholders (SAFPRS), to identify resident stakeholders in a flood project, rather than merely improving the weakness of stakeholder identification. Hopefully, this approach might ameliorate the current situation in Taiwan, where some important stakeholders have been too easily excluded in the execution of flood projects. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011