Project Stakeholder Management as the Integration of Stakeholder Salience, Public Participation, and Nonmarket Strategies

Despite the increasingly active role of civic actors, there is often no possibility for them to participate in project planning and decision-making. This discrepancy leads to costly conflicts and even failures. Unfortunately, the literature on project stakeholder management does not have sufficient theoretical substantiation to address this issue. To fill this knowledge gap, we integrate the concepts of stakeholder salience, public participation, and nonmarket strategy, and apply them to two urban infrastructure projects in Germany. This study contributes to the literature in two dimensions. First, it offers a dynamic and conceptual model for project stakeholder management, providing explanations for different conflict intensities. Second, it advances each individual area of research. Examples include the identification and clustering of so-called nonmarket assets, an examination of the influence of nonmarket strategies on managers’ perceptions of stakeholder salience, and the study of public participation in a corporate–political context, rather than a purely political one.