Stakeholders Mapping for Sustainable Biofuels: An Innovative Procedure Based on Computational Text Analysis and Social Network Analysis

Abstract: The identification and engagement of stakeholders is a challenge whose outcomes have a strong impact on a project’s success. This is even more relevant when the project concerns the introduction of sustainable technologies; these technologies are often less competitive on the market than traditional ones, both in terms of development complexity and production costs. This paper presents a stakeholder identification and mapping procedure, based on an Interest x Influence model, that emphasizes a quantitative methodological approach. The method has been applied on publicly available online data to identify and map potential stakeholders of a European research project aiming at creating a new biomass-derived biofuel. A semi-supervised procedure, built by combining computational text analysis and social network analysis techniques, has been used to calculate Interest and Influence scores for each potential stakeholder toward the project. The results show that stakeholders can be ranked on both dimensions and mapped on a bi-dimensional space according to their level of Interest and Influence. Within projects aiming at developing technologies for sustainability in which a wide range of stakeholders are involved at a transnational level, this stakeholder mapping technique provides a useful tool that can be adopted even with little knowledge on specific fields of application. A further asset of this approach lies in the possibility of profiling stakeholders on the basis of their Interest in the target project: this allows us to know the contents of a stakeholder (or stakeholders category) Interest, and therefore to have useful information for addressing the targeted stakeholder by means of a content design which is based on specific content categories, substantiating the stakeholder(s) Interest in the specific project.