Stakeholders

Stakeholders are individuals, groups, or organizations that can benefit from an evaluation or those who can affect or may be affected by an evaluation process or its findings. The word stakeholder originated in gambling in 16th-century England, where wagers were posted on wooden stakes. Later the term was broadened to refer to a neutral or trustworthy person who held a wager until the winner was decided. The term stakeholders was brought into evaluation from management consulting where it was adopted in 1963 at the Stanford Research Institute as a way of describing people who were not directly stockholders in a company but whose support was critical to the company’s success, for example, critically skilled employees and senior leadership.

Increasingly, stakeholders are seen as important in evaluation practice for both practical and ethical reasons. The emphasis in evaluation on identifying and engaging key stakeholders is based on the principle of intentionality, namely, that evaluation credibility, relevance, and use is enhanced by focusing on the intended uses of the evaluation by the primary intended users. This means that the evaluator does not alone determine the priority evaluation questions and methods but works with key stakeholders throughout the evaluation process.

Research has demonstrated that attention to and involvement of key stakeholders strengthens the design and implementation of evaluations and makes evaluation results more useful. This entry discusses the different types of stakeholders, stakeholder identification and analysis, and dealing with variations in stakeholder power.