Citizen and stakeholder involvement has always been somewhat challenging issue in local economic development. How to involve different stakeholder groups in local economic development? What is the role of citizen participation in such a process? How about various special groups, such as professionals, students, or senior citizens?
One way of looking at this issue is to change the view from conventional rights-based and democratically-oriented view of participation towards involvement in value creation. In short, such a shift opens up a horizon that helps to reconceptualize economic inclusion and, to be more precise, the stakeholder involvement in local economic development.
There is a wide range of mechanisms and forms of stakeholder engagement, which are often categorized on the basis of the degree they allow citizen control. The fundamental distinction can be made between non-participation (e.g. information sharing), participation and direct citizen control, based on Arnstein’s (1969) classic paper on the ladder of citizen participation or the Inform-Consult-Empower scheme (Lee et al., 2011).
One way of looking at this issue is to change the view from conventional rights-based and democratically-oriented view of participation towards involvement in value creation. In short, such a shift opens up a horizon that helps to reconceptualize economic inclusion and, to be more precise, the stakeholder involvement in local economic development.
There is a wide range of mechanisms and forms of stakeholder engagement, which are often categorized on the basis of the degree they allow citizen control. The fundamental distinction can be made between non-participation (e.g. information sharing), participation and direct citizen control, based on Arnstein’s (1969) classic paper on the ladder of citizen participation or the Inform-Consult-Empower scheme (Lee et al., 2011).
In the case of
economic inclusion perspective on participation changes (see e.g. Wiley-Little, 2013). Rather than the degree of citizen influence or control or the intensity
or transformational power of citizen participation, economic or value creation
perspective urges us to look for the best possible ways of involving local actors in value
generation, co-creation and sharing. One way of systematizing the levels of
value creation is illustrated in the figure below.
Figure 1. The ladder of stakeholder value creation.
This figure
describes a value-creation development from attitudinal change and capacity
building towards different levels of genuine organized value creation, from facilitated
action to entrepreneurial value orchestration. At the highest level we may
speak of leading for value, which is about insightful leadership in the complex
global business environment to guide high value-adding producers in delivering
value for their customers and other stakeholders.
References
Arnstein, Sherry
R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute
of Planners, 35(4), 216-224.
Lee, Deirdre,
Loutas, Nikolaos, Sánchez-Nielsen, Elena, Mogulkoc, Esen, & Lacigova, Oli
(2011). Inform-Consult-Empower: A Three-Tiered Approach to eParticipation. In:
Tambouris, E., Macintosh, A., de Bruijn, H. (Eds.), Electronic Participation,
pp. 121-132. ePart 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 6847. Berlin
and Heidelberg: Springer.
Wiley-Little,
Anise D. (2013). Profitable Diversity: How Economic Inclusion Can Lead to
Success. Two Harbors Press.
