Climate Adaptation Stakeholder Map

What is it?

A tool to help you understand who is important to involve in planning and delivering local climate resilience and adaptation actions. Places, communities, and organisations cannot adapt in isolation; it requires the involvement of different individuals and institutions, so it is useful to map out who needs to be involved. This can help:

• Identify potential stakeholders (groups, networks, projects, underrepresented groups)

• ‘Power map’ stakeholders (identify their levels of knowledge/influence) and the links between them.

• Prioritise those groups or networks that could potentially have the greatest reach, or that are particularly important to involve

Who is it for?

Anyone who is beginning to work on climate change adaptation in their place and wants to understand who they should involve. This will also be helpful for groups that have been engaged in local climate action and want to re-evaluate who they are engaging with.

How to use it

During the mapping

Step 1

It is important to first establish what climate ready might mean for your place and what changes are you seeking to achieve. Collect different opinions from the participants. These will be important in the next steps as you define your relevant stakeholders. If your group already has a vision of what being climate ready means for your place, begin by introducing this.

Step 2

Delve into understanding key stakeholders for your place and what they are like. Think about stakeholders across four areas: community groups and third sector organisations, local authority teams, local businesses, and national institutions/government agencies. As you map them on the template, place those that you think have most influence closer to the middle of the circle and those who have less influence on the outer edges. Think about what their key concerns, roles or attitudes might be. The more specific you can be (down to individual level even), the more helpful it will be to plan your work in the future. Some questions you may find it helpful to ask:

• Who makes what decisions?

• Who are the influential?

• Who can de-polarize?

• Who can model for others?

• Who is underrepresented/particularly vulnerable to climate change?

Step 3

After you’ve mapped your stakeholders according to the power or influence they have, establish the relationship between them and what climate ready means for your place (Step 1). Participants can draw lines between stakeholders, which can help to identify ‘nodes’ (bits of the network that have the greatest reach, which can help identify stakeholders to prioritise). You can do so by answering the following questions:

• Is there anything specific we want more influential stakeholders to know/understand?

• What, specifically, do we want them to change?

• What can support the desired changes?

• Are there any opinion leaders we could work with?

• How do organisations link to each other? Do they know each other; work together; share office space?

• What are the power dynamics between organisations? Who is funded by who?

After the mapping

Use the results of your stakeholder power/influence mapping to decide what people and/or organisations you want to work with.