Framing Stakeholder Involvement in Sustainable Port Planning

This paper presents a framework to encompass stakeholder involvement in port planning processes, by specifically focusing on long-term strategic plans aimed at sustainability and designed to satisfy the needs of a port community and its surroundings. A classification of the main port stakeholders is presented together with some traditional and non-conventional tools and methods that can be used to support the participation process, according to the degree of participation and the steps of the plan. This analysis takes its clue from the results of the EU PORTA project, aimed at setting a new system of guidelines to integrate regional planning and port management. Port authorities and local policy-makers can use the output of this analysis to understand how to deal with the complexity of multi-actor decisions in port planning. By duly taking into consideration stakeholders’ needs and concerns it will be easier to find the most shared solutions pursuing port sustainability.