Stakeholder analysis as a tool for improving strategic planning of the urban environment

Abstract

Contemporary urban governance increasingly involves the participation of various groups of stakeholders in the strategic planning and development of urban environment. Coordination of actions of city authorities and stakeholders becomes one of the most important issues of the governmental effectiveness, while the search for interested groups and cooperation with them is an important direction of both research and governmental activities. In this study, we aim to identify stakeholders in smart city development process and test the effectiveness of the stakeholderanalysis method as a tool for improving strategic planning of the urban environment, using the case of Moscow. We demonstrate how the use of the tools of social network analysis allows to focus strategic documents on stakeholder groups that play an important role in the development of the city, although not an obvious one. The object of empirical study is social relations between the main stakeholders of urban environment that influence strategic management. We use the centrality measures analysis to identify the main stakeholders that have the strongest and weakest impact on the development of a smart city of Moscow, and the edge betweenness method to identify the existing communities of urban actors. The paper discusses the problems of communication strategizing in large cities, and also concludes that the use of stakeholder analysis in the context of the urban environment can improve the quality of strategy development and implementation.