Comparison of Stakeholder Identification Techniques in Environmental Decision Making: A Case Study of Integrated Water Management in Samut Songkhram Province/ การเปรียบเทียบเทคนิคการระบุผู้มีส่วนเกี่ยวข้องในกระบวนการตัดสินใจทางสิ่งแวดล้อม

บทคัดย่อ

This qualitative research is aimed to investigate efficiency of four different stakeholder identification techniques, i.e., the importance-influence matrices, the experts, snowball sampling, and focus group discussion. Evaluation criteria involved effectiveness of the results, time spent, expense, and requirements of additional supports. A case study of integrated water management was conducted on the Mae Klong river in Samut Songkhram province. For the stakeholder identification outcomes, the similarities among the outcomes of all techniques are apparently shown in farmers and fishermen, local villagers and government officers categories. For other categories, different techniques provided different results. There were fifteen stakeholder groups that were suggested by each particular technique. For the effectiveness of each technique, the stakeholder identification by using the matrices implicitly provided degrees of significance of stakeholders in terms of importance and influence. However, it could be time, cost, and effort consuming process when the examiner had inadequate knowledge about the case study and there was very little information available. For other techniques, the results were likely subjective. In addition, for the identification by the experts and snowball sampling techniques, a great deal of time and cost was spent on travelling. A focus group discussion could be considered as the most cost consuming for arrangement. In a conclusion, each  technique was found to have different strengths and weaknesses. To choose the most appropriate stakeholder identification technique for each case study, complexity of the problem, time, budgets, as well as information availability should be taken into account.