Stakeholder Value Analysis – a Practical Approach to Environmental Decision Making and Consensus Building.

The driving force behind this research has been the hypothesis that the uncertainties, risks and potential for conflict faced by decision makers charged with making environmental investment, policy or strategy decisions are best managed by a process that integrates stakeholder preferences and needs into the decision process. To be effective this process must aim to define the goals of these stakeholders, the particular performance attributes which help to achieve these goals, the relative preferences for these attributes and their perception of the alternatives’ performance against these attributes. In this research, such a process has been termed Stakeholder Value Analysis (SVA). From a decision maker’s perspective this process is both challenging and problematic since it is highly complex and is not supported by the traditional decision making tools of decision makers such as Net Present Value (NPV), Payback and Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA). With these challenges in mind, coupled with extensive literature review and development and validation work in industry, this research has resulted in the specification and development of a methodology to support a Stakeholder Value Analysis process. In practical terms this process is operationalised through a toolkit of inter-linked decision support models which the research work has either developed or identified. Application of SVA to real life decisions has resulted in a portfolio of case studies, whereby each demonstrates not only how the SVA process addresses the challenges of environmental decision making and how it adds value to the decision making process, but also how it can be used to support diverse decision types characterised by different levels of uncertainty and strategic importance. In this way this research’s development and validation work has shown that the SVA process is flexible and adaptive, meets a definite need and adds value to the decision process in a supportive and practical way