Competence, interest and power in participatory transport planning: Framing stakeholders in the "participation cube"

This paper presents a new procedure for a simplified stakeholder analysis aimed at categorizing transport stakeholders according to their level of competence, interest, and power in decision-making in a three-dimensional space that we call "participation cube". Knowing in advance what role each stakeholder can play in the final decision and how she/he is related to the other stakeholders can be crucial for the success of any process aimed at consensus building. A preliminary stakeholder analysis is thus needed at an early stage of transport planning. A theoretical framework is here provided, built on literature, and a practical application is presented as an example to test it in a real-world case. The aim is to help policy-makers and practitioners to understand, in advance, how to deal with stakeholders in transport planning processes with the aim to foster consensus on shared decisions.