Stakeholder Involvement in Decision Making: A Short Guide to Issues, Approaches and Resources

Radioactive waste management is embedded in broader societal issues such as the
environment, risk management, energy, health policy and sustainability. In all
these fields, there is an increasing demand for public involvement, participation
and engagement. Involvement may take different forms at different phases and
can include sharing information, consulting, dialoguing or deliberating on
decisions with relevant stakeholders. Stakeholder involvement should be seen as a
meaningful part of formulating and implementing public policy. There is no single
approach for organising engagement; initiatives must respond to their context and
to stakeholders’ particular needs. As the number of stakeholder involvement
approaches and publications describing them continues to grow, new horizons are
opening up through social media.
This guide outlines the steps and issues associated with stakeholder
involvement that will assist practitioners and facilitate access to useful online
resources (handbooks, toolboxes and case studies). It will also provide nonspecialists
with an idea of what is needed to select an approach when involving
stakeholders in decision making. This 2015 update of Stakeholder Involvement
Techniques: Short Guide and Annotated Bibliography is considerably enriched with
experiences and extensive references to the literature.
The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) Forum on Stakeholder Confidence (FSC),
created under a mandate from the NEA Radioactive Waste Management
Committee (RWMC) to facilitate the sharing of international experience in
addressing the societal dimension of radioactive waste management, oversaw the
updating of the 2004 publication.
The FSC explores means of ensuring an effective dialogue among all
stakeholders and considers ways to strengthen confidence in decision-making
processes. This short guide demonstrates to conveners in many fields that
involvement initiatives must be sensitive to and serve the specific context and that
relevant stakeholders must be associated in the co-framing of engagement issues.
Because the FSC focuses on societal confidence in radioactive waste management,
examples are drawn from this field. However, these are provided simply as
illustrations as there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to stakeholder engagement,
and the FSC does not support one specific methodology over another presented in
this guide. Information is provided for the sake of enhancing awareness about
existing literature and resources. Complementing the guide is a separate
annotated bibliography published online so as to facilitate regular updating (NEA,
2015).