[MUSIC] Hi everyone. My name is Ligia Paina, and I'm an assistant scientist in the department of international health. In today's lecture, we'll be going over understanding stakeholders and how to engage with them. First we'll discuss who is the stakeholder. Then we will go over three common approaches to understand and engage with stakeholders. And we'll conclude with a summary of the key takeaways. So who is a stakeholder? Being from Romania, when I hear about a Stakeholder, I think of. He has a stake, but what he does with his stake is quite cruel, so hopefully we wouldn't have to invite him to a meeting. More common Stakeholders in public health are the community health workers, mothers, politicians, ministers of health, non-governmental organizations and everyone in between. A stakeholder can be any person or organization or social group, for that matter, who has a vital interest in the issue at hand. But again, who has a stake in an issue really depends on the problem in the context that you're working in. So, it's very helpful to have that well defined beforehand. And stakeholders, they each bring to the table different perspectives. A community health worker like in the left picture will have a different perspective than one of the politicians or ministers of health that you see illustrated on the right-hand side. So, it's important to bring them together. Because as you remember from the biggest lecture, in complex systems, the actors in the relationships, and how they change overtime are really, really important. So, looking at these characteristics, and the types of tools that one might use, in today's lecture we'll focus on three of these mainly the ones that would help us understand who the stakeholders are in case we don't know who they are. And then to capture their different perspectives in order to both understand them and depending on the situation try to obtain buy-in or build consensus. It's worth noting another approach and this will be covered in subsequent lectures in more detail. But group, or participatory model building is an approach that really allows us to cut across and understand all of these different characteristics. And it's usually used in building causal loop diagrams or system dynamics models. But, in order to get to that stage and invite stakeholders to your table to collaborate on a model together, it's often helpful to understand who they are, where they are, and what their interest might be. And the three tools we'll be going over briefly today help us get a little bit closer to that. And I should mention that this is not an exhaustive list. But hopefully going through these three will give you a flavor of various approaches that might be available. So the first of the approaches is the Stakeholder Analysis, and the main use of the Stakeholder Analysis is to identify stakeholders, and to anticipate what their position will be in relation to a policy change or to an issue. And one of the nicely arranged stakeholder analysis of purchase was put together by Professor Hyder and colleagues, and it outlines three phases. And I suggest that you read the article for greater detail. But I'll highlight that the first phase is focused on defining the outcomes of interest, or policy changes of interest, as well as what you expect the consequences of these to be. And as part of that, it's important to define the aim of the analysis, the time dimension, whether you're looking back or forward looking, the context in which you're working in, and at what level the analysis will take place, acknowledging that you might have multiple levels of interest. Based on this definition, the second phase involves the data gathering and that is done through communications with stakeholders in-depth interviews and other ways to collect information that helps you identify, map and profile the stakeholders. And finally the third phase helps you analyze the data that you gathered and it helps you understand stakeholders in terms of their power position and perspective. So this third phase really gives you the results of your analysis. But it's important to note that while perhaps you might get a lot of gratification from the matrices and tables that you'll construct, what is really important and the most difficult part are the steps taken in Phase I and Phase II. Which are creating the boundaries of your analysis and helping to define what types of stakeholders you'll explore. And this three-phase approach is further broken down into 12 steps, and you'll see that the first four steps map to the first phase, and so forth. Again these steps highlight the need to articulate a very clear problem statement and to really spend time to understand, systematically who the key stakeholders might be and in what categories they might fit in. And, you'll see that the type of data that you collect then helps you categorize them by power, influence, as well as by the level of agreement with the policy proposal. And it's worth noting as well that the 12th step highlights the fact that stakeholders are not a static group or category. They might change over time, they might change in composition. So you might have new actors that come in that are important. Stakeholders might change their position as to the issue that you're interested in. So it's often times advised to consider planning for repeating the analysis in time. That was a very brief overview of the methods and what you will eventually get are these matrices and tables that can be used to analyze the data. And this table is an example that would help you categorize the different stakeholders by level in the system and also by different characteristics that might be of interest. And the idea is that, eventually, you should be able to place the different stakeholders along a similar graph. This one is the two axes are agreement and power and influence, but you might find that there are other dimensions of interest. And what these will help you do is identify where the stakeholders might be placed so that you can think through ways to engage with them, how to involve them, how to collaborate with them, how to monitor people's behavior, where to target the information that you might have available. For further references I think that there are many resources out there for Stakeholder Analysis. I'm selecting three of them, the first two for methodological purposes and the third one because it gives many examples of different matrices and tables that you might be interested in using.