Who Are the Stakeholders of Drone Use? Roles, Benefits, Risk Perceptions, and Solutions

Drone technologies are now increasingly paving their way into commercial application with a promise of facilitating traditional operations. With the foreseeable increase in use of drones across multiple sectors and with rising concerns associated with drone flights, there is a need to perform stakeholder analyses for commercial drone usage. Based on the data collected from 15 expert interviews, literature search and a workshop, this paper presents a framework of actors who impact on or are impacted by the use of drones. It illustrates how the identified stakeholder groups could potentially benefit from drones, mainly economic, societal and environmental advantages, and on the other describes the challenges and concerns from the view-point of each stakeholder group. The findings reveled that safety is regarded as a high concern, however does not appear to be a principle concern for industry users and the overflown communities. The performed analysis points out that among the categorized stakeholders, overflown communities are perceived to have the highest opposition towards drone use. We conclude with discussing solutions on how to mitigate their concerns so as to facilitate increased social acceptance of drone usage.