Stakeholder Collaboration: Organizing for Environmental Justice and Equitable Solutions

This course is a collaboration between the University of Maryland College Park’s Project Management Center for Excellence and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. While each course stands alone, the series works together to provide the knowledge, skills, and frameworks to lead projects that address Socio-Environmental problems.

In this course, we are building from the point of having successfully completed Stakeholder Outreach. This means that the major complex problem has been identified, measured, and distilled into a powerful narrative that can engage stakeholders to drive them to the next step: Stakeholder Collaboration.

To get started, we need to orient towards "why" we need to collaborate after collaboration. The answer? Problem complexity. Tackling complexity is a task no one person can do by its definition. Truly complex and wicked problems have no stopping point, no clarity of definition, and change as you try to improve the current state so you must reassess. Complex issues are also defined by a lack of complete information in any one party. The issues involve many standpoints, perspectives, and details partitioned among those involved. That’s why it’s “complex.” To solve this we need to tackle the problem which is termed “requisite variety,” a term coined by David Benjamin and David Komlos in their book “Cracking Complexity,” which is to say we need all the diverse representatives from those parts of the complex problem to bring their unique knowledge and perspective together.

In science when we do this it’s called “Transdisciplinary Approaches.” In Project Management we call this “cross-disciplinary” and “cross-organizational” problem solving. But what’s unique about Environmental Project Management is the often added problem of no organization existing among the rights holders that are impacted by the problems. So the added job of rallying and organizing these groups is added to the list of challenges for the Environmental Project Leader. Then the work of getting a first view of the complex problem can truly begin.

MODULE 1: COLLABORATING TO SOLVE SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS WITH A TRANSDISCIPLINARY APPROACH

1. Why Stakeholder Engagement?

2. Classifying Problems

3. Socio-Environmental Systems

4. Transdisciplinary Approaches

5. Planning and Implementing

6. Adaptive Governance

Adaptive governance

MODULE 2: MANAGING AND LEADING A TEAM TOWARDS A SHARED VISION

1. Agile Leader's Process

2. Framing Purpose

3. Adapting to Agile

4. Power of Play

5. Mastery, Autonomy, Purpose

MODULE 3: TOOLS FOR ENGAGEMENT

1. Enabling Conditions

2. Stakeholder Analysis

3. Collaborative Learning

4. Workshop Planning

5. Facilitation and Engagement

6. Casual Loop Diagrams

7. Social Network Analysis

8. Finding Stories that Resonate

MODULE 4: MANAGING CONFLICT

1. Emotional Intelligence

2. Cultural Intelligence

3. Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM)

4. CMM Tools

5. Dynamic Problem Solving

6. Negotiation Field Guides

7. Advanced Negotiation Techniques

MODULE 5: MOVING TO ACTION WITH RISK MANAGEMENT EVALUATION AND MAINTAINING RELATIONSHIPS

1. Basics of Risk Management

2. Telling Risk Management Stories

3. Evaluating Transdisciplinary Research

4. Theory of Change

5. Adaptive Governance

6. Examples of Great Champions