Stakeholder Management for Sustainable Development Implementation: The Case of a Sustainable Urban Drainage System

Sustainable development has been widely supported as the concept upon which the future, if we are to have one, must be founded. As such and simplistically, it has often been expected that changes in behaviour at the local level would become evident as sustainable development becomes more entrenched in thinking and practice. Unfortunately, a failure to detect the occurrence of such changes gives rise to the notion that the concept of sustainable development is substantially problematic to translate from thought into action. This has led to greater attention on the procedures of sustainable development implementation (Lafferty and Langhelle, 1999b) and to its examination using new lenses for consideration and enquiry (Gladwin et al. , 1995). This paper uses stakeholder thinking to analyse a case study of a local-level implementation of sustainable development, in the form of a sustainable urban drainage system in Sheffield, England. The paper utilises stakeholder thinking to examine the roles of stakeholders in the case in order to analyse the distribution of the impacts of the implementation and by doing so to better understand the process of implementation. The paper demonstrates the complexity of stakeholder relationships, interactions and processes of engagement (Georgakopoulos and Thomson, 2008) in that, although the analysis suggests the implementation to represent an ‘all stakeholder win’, it also highlights that each stakeholder has the power to both impede and facilitate the process. A confused ‘collective responsibility’ situation between stakeholders is identified, judged to lack real accountability and to be creating inertia. From these findings the paper gives consideration to alterations to create real world change towards more favourable conditions for sustainable development implementation.