It’s stakeholder mapping Jim but not as we know it

By James Georgalakis

What happens when you create fictitious organisations working on make-believe influencing scenarios and ask a bunch of people who have never worked together before to develop stakeholder maps for them? Quite cool stuff actually.

At a recent IDS short course designed to provide a broad overview of research and policy communications we included a section on stakeholder mapping tools. Over the past decade I have run many workshops which included some form of stakeholder mapping exercise. But whether the sessions took place with civil society organisations in Malawi, researchers in Nepal or social workers in Ukraine, context was always key. During all these capacity building events we worked on real scenarios. So what were we to do in a single day with 25 participants from a broad range of think tanks, universities, NGOs and consultancies, two thirds of whom had never undertaken any kind of stakeholder mapping before? Make it up of course!

We simply created five pretend scenarios based on very different policy contexts inspired by the range of participants we were expecting. We surveyed them first checking what kind of policy actors they typically targeted. We then got pretty creative making up an organisational profile, an influencing objective and we even suggested some potential stakeholders they might want to kick things off with. The exercise was otherwise pretty much like any other network mapping style process. They identified further stakeholders, they placed them on a large map to indicate their relationship to their made up institution and they looked at their relationship to one another. They then scored each one in terms of their level of influence on the issue and the likelihood of them being allies, opponents or neutral in relation to the hoped for influencing goal.

One of the main differences from a more conventional session was it was faster. Detailed maps were produced in under an hour and a half – although they would have all happily taken much longer if we’d let them. With less time spent on reviewing objectives (we provided these) and dissecting deep rooted institutional issues around identity, legitimacy, power and profile, the participants quickly explored different external stakeholders and their potential usefulness. However, the discussions still contained much of the richness that more conventional sessions do. Our approach meant that we had mixed groups learning from one another’s institutional and sector perspectives. They quickly discovered they had quite different ideas about how change happens and the impact of research, and begun exploring hidden power relationships. In the group I facilitated they challenged the narrow list of parliamentary and governmental stakeholders we had suggested and wanted to extend their map to include civil society organisations, social scientists and the media. This in turn helped them unpack what it means to try to influence the quality of a particular public policy discourse with evidence (they were pretending that they were going to try and engage with the controversial debate on the impact of immigration on the UK in the run up to a General Election!)

The participants really seemed to gain an appreciation of the importance of mapping your policy environment and how documenting the discussion is almost as useful as the map itself. They revisited their maps in the afternoon and used them to select priority audiences for whom a communications plan was then developed. It all felt pretty real by the end and the fictitious scenarios appeared to deliver much the same learning and tools, that they could apply back in their own organisations, as any more realistic grounded exercise would have done.

You can download all the course materials including the stakeholder mapping scenarios and facilitators notes here. IDS is currently developing an Achieving Influence and Impact Series, so do let us know if you would like to be kept informed of future courses and free resources on this topic: training@ids.ac.uk

James Georgalakis, is the Head of Communications at IDS
Follow James @ www.twitter.com/bloggs74

Other posts by James Georgalakis on research communications:

The Guardian
Has Twitter killed the media star?
Marketing: still the dirty word of development?

On Think Tanks
Is it wrong to herald the death of the institutional website?
How can we make research communications stickier? 

Impact and Learning 
Digital repositories – reaching the parts other websites cannot reach
Influencing and engagement: why let research programmes have all the fun?
Going for gold: why and how is IDS bringing our journal back in house and making it open access?

Going for gold: Why and how is IDS bringing our journal back in-house and making it open access?

By James Georgalakis

The recent announcement by IDS that we are not planning to renew our contract with Wiley Blackwell for the publication of our journal, the IDS Bulletin, will have delighted some and baffled others. Re-launching our flagship publication as a gold open access digital journal means the end of subscription income and the end of a large publisher’s marketing support. From January 2016 the Bulletin will be produced in-house and will be available to all for free.

Since 1968 the IDS Bulletin has been an integral part of IDS’ research dissemination strategy, covering the major themes and influencing debates within international development. As we move forward we will build on its unique characteristics including the thematic issues that mobilise scholars from multiple disciplines, around key development issues. However, for the first time in its history from 2016 there will be no paywall, no embargos and few licencing restrictions to obstruct researchers, students, policy actors and activists from using the Bulletin to support their work.

This new open access IDS Bulletin will be supported by robust editorial and peer review processes with an editorial steering group made up of IDS fellows from all of our key research areas plus an advisory body to provide oversight. Academic editors of issues will be drawn from across the IDS community, including our partners, and a small in-house production team will provide a high quality publication available for free digitally and in print for those that need it.

Who Pays?
Of course the key conundrum of the open access movement has always been who pays? If not the subscriber then surely the researcher (via their funder of course). What this means in practice for conventional social science journals is paying article processing charges (APCs) of around £2000 per article to commercial publishers. In the case of the new IDS Bulletin we are dispensing with this process altogether and simply bringing production and distribution in-house and charging projects and programmes a fixed sum of just under £6000 for a whole issue of up to 9 articles and then fundraising to meet the shortfall. With its long history, policy focused thematic issues, not-for-profit financial model and full compliance with even the most stringent open access policies, we are confident that the IDS open access Bulletin will attract the financial support it needs to continue to provide fresh new thinking on key development issues.

Why not just publish a hybrid?
A hybrid publishing route involves placing submitted versions (post peer review but pre editing and formatting) of your articles in a repository and making others gold open access with APCs. Many publishers including Wiley have developed hybrid systems. However, the Bulletin is quite different to other journals. With thematic issues that are often built around a specific research project or programme the use of APCs is almost impossible. We need to fund each whole issue otherwise it is game over. Hence the charge we apply to projects wanting to commission an issue. Plus, simply releasing the submitted versions of articles still fails to meet the strictest of open access mandates such as DFID’s. In fact, this hybrid route was originally recommended by the UK Government as part of a five-year transition (from 2012 to 2017) towards fully Gold Open Access. It does not work for us and it may not represent a long term solution for other learned societies in the social science sector.

An open access strategy fit for fifty years in development studies
Our emerging open access strategy and our desire to pursue engaged excellence demands that we open access to as much of our evidence and knowledge as possible. The schemes to open up access to journals to southern institutions such as HINARI, AGORA and OARE under the Research4Life programme are good but no longer go far enough. The ongoing evolution of the IDS Bulletin is in part thanks to Wiley Blackwell themselves who have over the last six years helped build its credibility and reach. However, the expiry of our contract with Wiley at the end of 2015 marked an opportunity to take the journal into the next exciting phase of its development. It will be re-launched in our fiftieth year and form a key part of our anniversary celebrations as we release the entire back catalogue. This major publishing event will form part of the narrative around the Institute’s fiftieth birthday as we explore our future role in a changing world in which development knowledge is generated globally and we seek to share it with all those that need it.

James Georgalakis, is the Head of Communications at IDS
Follow James @ www.twitter.com/bloggs74

Other posts by James Georgalakis on research communications:

The Guardian
Has Twitter killed the media star?
Marketing: still the dirty word of development?

On Think Tanks
Is it wrong to herald the death of the institutional website?
How can we make research communications stickier? 

Impact and Learning 
Digital repositories – reaching the parts other websites cannot reach
Influencing and engagement: Why let research programmes have all the fun?