Stakeholder Analysis for Austria [WIKIAlps

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===== Stakeholder Analysis for Austria =====

===Branches and types of stakeholders===
With respect to the thematic fields, it can be stated that the number of stakeholders within “resource efficiency” is 50% higher than within the field “inclusive growth”. Almost 45% of all stakeholders (both fields) are either research institutes or universities. Since these institutions are predominantly public, it is not surprising that only 8% of the total number of stakeholders can be classified as private. Research institutes and universities are mostly located at the national—to a lower degree—regional level, thus, this fact leads to a very low number of stakeholders at the local level, which only represents 6% of the total cases. 


===Thematic focus of stakeholders===
Regarding the thematic interest of the stakeholders, environmental planning (23%) and regional development (15%) are the most frequent classes, which are mainly ascribed to their larger thematic field (“resource efficiency” and “inclusive growth,” respectively). While only 4% of the partners are located outside the Alpine Convention’s limits, about 13% of all partners have been lead partner—at least in one project. Interestingly, only 35% of the stakeholders have participated in just one project, while the vast majority participated in two or more projects (up to five). 

While the absolute number of research institutes of universities should be maintained (or even be extended), these national institutions’ relative share should decrease, that is, the number of other —regional and local—stakeholder types should increase. This is particularly necessary, for none of the universities and research centers are highly influential for sustainable development. In turn, the number of governmental partners (authority, spatial planning authority or water agency, environmental agency, for instance) is desired to be higher, for these stakeholders are rated as highly influential. Moreover, the need to increase local and private stakeholders is evident: only one stakeholder out of 68 is both “local” and “private”. Yet, this combination of characteristics is crucial for sustainable development, as the actors in bottom-up participation process are mainly “local” and “private”! Thus an increase of stakeholders belonging to this group would be necessary for reaching participatory spatial development. Finally, in the Austrian case, a greater diversity of stakeholders would not be bad, since only a third participated just one time, while the majority contributed to much more projects in the fields. The latter conveys the impression that, to a certain degree, the Austrian stakeholder network is somewhat static, and could profit from ideas of new groups of interest, particularly locally and privately working ones. For example stakeholders belonging to the Government of Carinthia participated five times and stakeholders from the University of Innsbruck took part in four projects. Participants that contributed to three projects include other Austrian university institutes (from the agricultural or veterinary universities) and other regional governmental departments, for example from Tyrol and Salzburg. This means that there is a good cooperation between governmental and research stakeholders in Austria, but at the same time there is a lack of AS-experienced local and private stakeholders such as small and medium enterprises or networks.


===Summary===
In sum, these interpretations support the results of a project in-depth analysis within the “resource efficiency” field: they led to the conclusion that only a few tools and methods developed for the broad public are available, and that the majority of findings is directed to a scientific readership; without a doubt, this weakness is related to the stakeholder network structure as shown by the case of Austria, where research and university stakeholders predominate.