Methodology for a participative mechanism

On the 28th of August, UrbanCOOP's project partners met online to share their experiences mananging the stakeholder meetings. Stakeholders' involvement is an important step in reporting good practices and relevant experience of policymaking. Thanks to the coordination of the reasearch team of the University of Turin, we have discussed the implementation and the scope of the methodology based on tangible and measurable results. 

A participatory approach is recommended for construction of relationships with diverse stakeholders. Through participation, the interests of different stakeholders can be systematically captured and built into the finalized scheme, which should help improve the projects' long-term viability and benefits to the community. However, it is unlikely that the expectations of all the stakeholders involved can be fulfilled as their concerns are rather diverse and often in conflict with each other.

The meeting, therefore, aimed to provide a means of evaluating the effectiveness of the participation exercise. This involves the development of a systematic way of measuring stakeholder engagement. Since the process of measurement is complicated and uncertain, requiring approximate reasoning involving human intuition, a fuzzy approach is adopted. A fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) is a method to facilitate multi-group, multi-criteria decision making. A method of stakeholder mapping, together with the power/interest matrix, will be used by project partners to identify stakeholders and their influence on the project itself.