Methodological Study of Stakeholder Analysis and its Application in Public Policy-making

The purpose of this research is to study policy issues and providing operational and scientific guidelines for policy makers. Policy research methods examine the factors influencing public policy and the impacts of policies on society and environment, using different methods to reach this end. Stakeholder analysis is one of these methods that emphasizes on comments of stakeholders to be taken into account in the policy making process. This can play an important role in enhancing the decision-making process, implementing the approved policies and plans, legitimizing issues, and strengthening cooperation between government agencies and the society. Public policy-making relates to very complicated environments consisting of various activists at both negative and positive poles. An analysis of a wide range of stakeholders with different interests and power levels requires a comprehensive and flexible methodology framework. Stakeholder analysis method, with an emphasis on feasibility indicators of public policies, plays an important role in the power equation and relations among the various actors in this field. Avoiding theoretical aspects of stakeholder analysis, this research has tried to apply the practical tools of this method to analyze public policies. Regarding the increasing role of scientific software in the fast and precise analysis of public policy data, policy maker software has been introduced as an advanced tool for stakeholder analysis and its benefits have been explained.