Thinking About Stakeholders of Public Agencies: The Georgia Department of Transportation Stakeholder Audit

Practitioners and scholars have grown increasingly interested in recent decades in how public administrators should and can work with the constituencies they serve. To date, most of this conversation has focused on citizens and broader communities rather than on stakeholders more generally, but these other stakeholders, ranging from oversight policy-making bodies to private sector and nonprofit contractors to governmental partners, are no less important than the general public. The purpose of this paper is to propose a first step that many agencies might take in thinking about their range of stakeholders, a step that we term a “stakeholder audit.” A stakeholder audit entails (1) mapping the universe of an agency’s stakeholders, (2) assessing the agency’s perceived needs for additional information relative to various stakeholder groups, and (3) developing suggestions on how to obtain that information. After first discussing the more general idea of stakeholder analyses, we describe the stakeholder audit technique, and illustrate how it has been applied to a particular agency, the State of Georgia’s Department of Transportation. We conclude by considering how a stakeholder audit could represent a first step for an agency in improving relationships with its stakeholders.