Towards an improved understanding of project stakeholder landscapes

Understanding stakeholders, their influences and devising engagement strategies based on the analyses of stakeholder landscapes has become one of the key capabilities within project-based firms. Based on a systematic literature review of the project stakeholder management literature, we develop a conceptual framework for characterizing and classifying project stakeholder landscapes. The framework synthesizes four key dimensions of project stakeholder landscapes and their various sub-factors: complexity (element and relationship complexity), uncertainty, dynamism and the institutional context. The developed framework will provide both academics and practitioners with a shared language to make sense of what types of stakeholder landscapes exist, to categorize projects based on their stakeholder environments and to start evaluating what types of implications different types of landscapes have on stakeholder management and project management in general.