Stakeholder engagement is the process used by an organisation to engage relevant stakeholders for a purpose to achieve accepted outcomes (AccountAbility, 2008). Stakeholder engagement is now considered to be central to business sustainability. It is a critical part of every reporting framework relating to corporate social responsibility and/or environmental and social governance.

This is because sustainability is very much about being transparent and accountable to your internal and external stakeholders. In addition, engagement is critical for identifying the material sustainability issues most relevant to any business sustainability journey and fostering innovation. Engagement can help sustainable businesses to balance environmental, social and financial issues – ensuring good governance, rigorous decision-making, and useful reporting/disclosure, in order to bring about meaningful change, away from a business-as-usual approach.

[NB. Given the importance of this topic, this page is as yet, still under construction so that the most concise, coherent resources may be compiled.]

Stakeholder Engagement Resources

• International Association for Public Participation
• Environmental Employee Engagement Roadmap: How to Build a Streamlined Program that Quickly Delivers Business and Environmental Results by Diana Glassman and Jie Pan (2015)
• Environmental Engagement Roadmap from Jie Elodie Pan
• Stakeholder Engagement: A Road Map to Meaningful Engagement by Neil Jefferey, from Cranfield University, School of Management (2009)
  

  Source: Jeffery 2009

• AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard from Accountability (2015)
• Quality Assurance Standard for Community and Stakeholder Consultation from the International Association for Public Participation (2015)
• The UNEP Stakeholder Engagement UNEP Engagement Handbook (Volumes 1 and 2) from United Nations Environment Program in collaboration with Accountability (2015)
• Stakeholder engagement – GRI (Global Reporting Initiative)
• Descriptions of Stakeholder engagement methods from Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, (2001)
• Green teams: Engaging Employees in Sustainability – pdf resource by Deborah Fleischer for GreenBiz (2009)
• 10 Tips for a Successful Green Team from Harvard University (2015)

Ebay is well-known for it’s successful green team initiative:
https://m.youtube.com/?#/watch?v=ZgGjx8VZ7U0

For more tools and frameworks, refer to the Getting to Sustainability resources under, Topics / Consumers / Communication & Behaviour