President, Confluence PSG
Somewhere along the way, “stakeholder” stopped being a noun and became a verb. I hear it constantly now. We stakeholded this. Let’s go stakehold that. And every time I hear it, I get a little more convinced that the word has drifted away from the thing it was supposed to protect.
Here’s what I mean when I say stakeholder engagement, the real version: the people who actually know a subject, who have lived it or worked it professionally, who are going to be the ones implementing whatever gets decided, sitting in a room long enough and honestly enough that you actually learn what they think and why. Not what they’re willing to say in a hearing room with a camera on them. What they actually think.
That’s not what most “stakeholding” looks like anymore. Too often it’s a bureaucratic box to check: four webinars, a public comment period, a press release saying the process was inclusive. Or it’s the other version, someone invites twelve people to a table, nine of whom they’ve already hand-picked because they know exactly what those nine will say. Either way, nothing real happened. The box got checked. The policy moved forward unchanged.
Then there’s the volume problem, which I think is underappreciated. A single legislative session sees hundreds of bills. It is not humanly possible to authentically and rigorously engage stakeholders on that many bills in that little time, even for legislators who genuinely want to. Add a seventy-five-person Zoom call where the bill sponsor explains what the bill does, a couple of people say they’re not happy about it, and everyone checks a box, and you’ve got the shape of modern “stakeholder engagement” in a lot of statehouses. Good intentions. Empty outcome.
None of this means public input is a bad idea. It’s the opposite. I’m in the business of talking to people who are affected by decisions, and I believe in that work more than almost anything else I do professionally. But there’s a real difference between authentic engagement and its imitation, and the imitation is getting better at looking like the real thing every year.
The tell, in my experience, is time. Real trust, the kind where someone will tell you what they actually think instead of what’s safe to say in a committee room, doesn’t happen in an hour. It happens over the course of a process built to earn it. You can’t manufacture that with a bigger invite list or a longer public comment period. You have to build a room where it’s actually possible.
That distinction, between engagement built to check a box and engagement built to earn trust, is a bigger part of the argument in our next paper than I expected it to be when we started writing it.Â
