Compare methods

	Stakeholder Analysis for Policy	Multi-Criteria Policy Analysis
Field	Public Policy	Public Policy
Family	Process / pipeline	MCDM
Year of origin	2009	2002
Originator	Management and development practice; typology synthesised by Reed and colleagues	Valerie Belton & Theodor Stewart (synthesis); MCDA tradition
Type	Systematic analysis of actors affected by or affecting a policy	Multi-criteria decision analysis applied to policy appraisal
Seminal source	Reed, M. S., Graves, A., Dandy, N., Posthumus, H., Hubacek, K., Morris, J., Prell, C., Quinn, C. H., & Stringer, L. C. (2009). Who's in and why? A typology of stakeholder analysis methods for natural resource management. Journal of Environmental Management, 90(5), 1933–1949.	Belton, V., & Stewart, T. J. (2002). Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis: An Integrated Approach. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ISBN: 9780792375050
Aliases	Stakeholder Analysis, Stakeholder Mapping, Interest-Influence Analysis	Multi-Criteria Analysis for Policy, MCDA Policy Appraisal, MCA in Policy, Multi-Criteria Policy Appraisal
Related	4	3
Summary	Stakeholder analysis is a systematic approach to identifying the individuals, groups and organisations affected by or able to affect a policy or program, characterising their interests and influence, and understanding the relationships among them. Reed and colleagues' influential 2009 typology organises the field into three tasks: identifying stakeholders, differentiating and categorising them, and investigating their relationships. The aim is to inform the design, implementation and evaluation of policy by clarifying whose interests are at stake, who holds power, and how to engage them — improving both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of decisions.	Multi-criteria policy analysis applies multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to appraise and rank policy options against several, often conflicting, objectives that cannot be reduced to a single money metric. Each option is scored on a set of explicit criteria — economic, social, environmental, distributional — the criteria are weighted to reflect their relative importance, and the scores are aggregated into an overall value that ranks the options. Set out comprehensively in Belton and Stewart's 2002 textbook and operationalised for government in the UK's widely used Multi-Criteria Analysis Manual, the approach makes the trade-offs in a policy decision transparent and structured rather than implicit.