Stakeholders’ Analysis within the Context of Maritime and Inland Waterways Observatory of Cambodia

The sub-project: "Achieving research sustainability in the National University of Management: Setting-up of a National Inland Waterway / Maritime Socioeconomic Activities Observatory" is within the World Bank's "Higher Education Quality Capacity Improvement Project" (HEQCIP). Its primary objectives are a) to consolidate the research at the National University of Management (NUM) and b) to found a research body in charge of producing multi-sectorial evidence-based academic research. At the beginning of the implementation process, the review of literature was made and the important stakeholders in the Fishing industry and Maritime Transport in Cambodia were identified. In order to have a clear idea which stakeholders could be valuable partners, they had to be contacted. A stakeholders' analysis was conducted by the research team in 2014. A number of public, private, NGOs and academic organizations were approached in order to present the project, collect data and discuss a future collaboration. The research team decided to apply two complementary methods in order to assess the importance of each of the selected stakeholders. The first one is more qualitative and based on the use of the Mendelow Power Versus Interest Grid in order to detect which groups of stakeholders deserve or require the attention of the Observatory, and which do not. The second applied method was more quantitative, based on the Social Network Analysis. It highlights the relations between the stakeholders in the selected economic sectors. The research team did not independently analyze each of the selected economic sectors because the objective of the report was mainly to detect the inter-sectorial organization by measuring closeness and betweenness centralities. In order to understand the relations between the selected stakeholders, the research team created a survey which was filled out by the stakeholders' representatives. All selected stakeholders were listed and the respondent had to assess the relation of his organization with each one of them. Four types of centralities have been analyzed: Degree, Closeness, Betweenness and Eigenvector.