Moving Beyond Place- and Past-Based Identities for Better Stakeholder Engagement

Infrastructure development is critical for economic and social well-being outcomes. However, community stakeholder engagement is often characterized by conflict and resistance rather than creativity and collaboration, causing infrastructure proposals to experience lengthy delays, or be poorly planned or abandoned. An important cause is the place identities of community stakeholders and their temporal orientations that result in them seeing infrastructure proposals as identity threats rather than opportunities. Problematically, stakeholder identity concerns and place identities remain at the periphery of stakeholder management literature. We develop an identity-based stakeholder engagement framework classifying stakeholders according to their salient identities and temporal orientations, including two dynamic identity trajectories that involve cueing other identities beyond place, and cueing multiple temporalities. These trajectories can facilitate community stakeholders’ reappraisal of infrastructure proposals as identity opportunities rather than threats. We also make practical recommendations on the framework’s implementation, explain the framework’s broader applicability, and identify implications for policy and future research.