A supply chain perspective of stakeholder identification as a tool for responsible policy and decision-making

Traditional stakeholder research typically departs from organisation-centric or issue-centric approaches. However, using these approaches for stakeholder identification lacks rigor and comprehensiveness, since these approaches cannot be used to embrace the complexity and dynamics of the organizational constituents. To address this gap, we propose adopting a supply chain perspective on stakeholder identification and describe the process in more detail with two cases of mercury trade and energy. Adopting a supply chain perspective reveals the direct and indirect stakeholders’ influences, allowing us to study their interrelations, and clearly shows the role of each constituent in the stakeholder nexus. This process can serve as a tool to support governments, businesses, researchers, and non-governmental organisations to help them identify stakeholders related to services or goods in a more rigorous and comprehensive manner. In turn, in terms of increasing stakeholder understanding and engagement, responsible decision- and policy-makers can adopt this process to improve their chances of reaching sustainability goals. The focus is here set on environmental strategies and policies but the approach can be applied in other contexts where supply chain stakeholders need to be identified in relation to a piece of goods or a service.