I couldn’t agree more with Seth’s emphasis on the importance of stakeholder engagement. I would add, and I’m sure he would agree, that one of the most important parts of it is to learn from stakeholders. Everyone’s background offers insights that are really hard to imagine from other perspectives. One doesn’t just want to understand which of one’s ideas they can convinced to implement—they should be part of the process of developing the ideas. They should also be part of picking the questions.
Stakeholder engagement is something that GPP has set itself a particularly tough challenge on. Because we are trying to be a ‘broad’ cause comparison organisation, we do not slot naturally into an existing community of decision-makers. At the moment, this means that we have the capacity to build a small number of strong relationships in many different communities. This makes us good at the learning part of stakeholder engagement. It might end up making us too weak to push new policy on our own. That is why, for example, our current strategy for pushing specific policies is to sell focused policy to organisations that focus on that space and let them carry the idea forward. It remains to be seen how well this will work. It may be that the difficulty of stakeholder engagement with such a broad range of activities will force us to narrow our work, but this is also a factor which we think may make the area neglected.
I couldn’t agree more with Seth’s emphasis on the importance of stakeholder engagement. I would add, and I’m sure he would agree, that one of the most important parts of it is to learn from stakeholders. Everyone’s background offers insights that are really hard to imagine from other perspectives. One doesn’t just want to understand which of one’s ideas they can convinced to implement—they should be part of the process of developing the ideas. They should also be part of picking the questions.
Stakeholder engagement is something that GPP has set itself a particularly tough challenge on. Because we are trying to be a ‘broad’ cause comparison organisation, we do not slot naturally into an existing community of decision-makers. At the moment, this means that we have the capacity to build a small number of strong relationships in many different communities. This makes us good at the learning part of stakeholder engagement. It might end up making us too weak to push new policy on our own. That is why, for example, our current strategy for pushing specific policies is to sell focused policy to organisations that focus on that space and let them carry the idea forward. It remains to be seen how well this will work. It may be that the difficulty of stakeholder engagement with such a broad range of activities will force us to narrow our work, but this is also a factor which we think may make the area neglected.