Finding and Developing Stakeholder Priorities

The Northeastern IPM Center's Requests for Applications (RFAs) require that proposals be linked to stakeholder-identified priorities for research, extension, education, and/or regulatory approaches. This criterion for evaluating projects is often poorly understood by proposal writers and inconsistently evaluated by proposal review panelists. Nonetheless, the evaluation of a proposal can hinge on a) how well the proposal writer shows that the project addresses a stakeholder-identified priority and b) how strong the priority is (as indicated by attributes discussed below).

Defining stakeholder

"Stakeholder" refers to any person or group with an interest in IPM for the particular setting involved. For example:

• Farmers or producers—considered a very important stakeholder group. Grower organizations (officers, employees, etc.) presumably represent many individual growers.
• Facility managers, including park managers, golf course managers, school facilities superintendents, and building managers.
• IPM providers of all types, including consultants, pest control operators, industry field representatives, and Extension agents. These are often viewed as stakeholders who bring a wider or more global view than individual IPM users because they may serve many clientele.
• Researchers in the appropriate field, including those associated with any university, governmental or private organization.
• Extension staff and other educators, including those associated with any university, governmental or private organization.
• Home managers, including homeowners, landlords, and renters engaged in IPM for homes, lawns, gardens, etc.
• Consumers of products and users of facilities, including intermediate consumers (e.g., buyers, distributors, retailers, as well as the ultimate consumer).
• People interested in the community and/or environment affected by IPM. These may be individuals or groups, including university, governmental, and non-governmental organizations.
• State and federal agency staff, such as in the state departments of agriculture, the EPA, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and IR-4.
  
  Usually proposals are strengthened by addressing priorities that are identified by a broad range of stakeholders. A priority identified as such by two stakeholder groups may be considered as having more value than a priority identified by only one group. Priorities agreed upon by many stakeholder groups are often considered more valuable than those agreed upon by few.

Needs and Priorities

The term “needs” is not synonymous with the term “priorities.” Identifying priorities usually entails sorting the larger list of needs to pick those that are most important or that should be addressed first. Thus the list of priorities for a setting is a subset of—and often much smaller than—the list of needs for the same setting. Many people feel that the power of a list of priorities is inversely related to the length of that list of priorities.

Timeliness

The timeliness of a stakeholder-identified priority affects its value. The date that the priority is identified helps to indicate timeliness, but even a chronologically “old” priority may be as valid and timely as a newly identified priority. To evaluate timeliness one should consider whether the results of prioritization are still valid, or whether, on the other hand, the need has been addressed or other needs might have displaced it in the prioritization.

Method of Priority Setting

Priority setting can be both an art and a science, with no set method having been determined as most acceptable. While it is rare to see the methods outlined as part of a list of priorities, outlining the procedure can strengthen the priority list. Including such information as a list of the participants, their affiliations and titles, an outline of how “needs” were solicited from stakeholders, and how these “needs” were determined to be “priorities”, will add credence to the list.

Access to the Priority

An important attribute of a stakeholder-identified priority for the purposes of evaluating grant proposals is that the priority can be easily found by any person interested in finding IPM priorities for this setting. If an issue is truly a priority for a stakeholder group, that group should not care who addresses it but only that it be addressed well and in a timely fashion. Thus a real priority is readily available to anyone. Reviewers should be able to easily verify the validity of any citation of a priority.

Some Sources of Stakeholder-Identified Priorities

There are many avenues for posting and finding stakeholder-identified priorities. These include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Pest management strategic plans (PMSPs), found in the IPM Center's national database, online at http://www.ipmcenters.org/pmsp/;
• Published journals, either refereed or otherwise;
• Publicized results of stakeholder surveys;
• Meeting reports or minutes from stakeholder organizations;
• The Northeastern IPM Center priorities page, developed to enable publication of priorities that might otherwise not have a suitable avenue for publication; (http://northeastipm.org/regu_regional.cfm);
• Published priorities of grants programs sponsored by grower organizations or comparable sponsoring organizations.

PMSPs and Crop Profiles

The standard template for Pest Management Strategic Plans (PMSPs) includes stakeholder definition of priorities for research, extension, and regulatory efforts. As such, well-written PMSPs should be excellent sources of stakeholder-identified priorities.
Crop profiles describe the IPM situation at the time they are written and provide information about IPM needs. Authors of crop profiles are not required to seek strong stakeholder input or a structured process to prioritize needs, so some profiles are not the strongest sources of stakeholder-identified priorities.

Letters of Support

Proposal writers often include letters of support from stakeholders or stakeholder groups, sometimes in lieu of any other linkage to stakeholder-identified priorities. The value of such letters can vary a great deal based on several considerations:

• If the review process requires a relevance statement that is distinct from the proposal, the appropriate reviewers may not see letters of support. (Such is the case with the Northeastern Competitive IPM Grants program, for instance. In that program, relevance reviewers would not know of the existence of letters of support unless they were referenced in the relevance statement.)
• A letter can be a relatively powerful indicator of links to stakeholder-identified priorities if the letter explicitly describes wide support from a stakeholder group. Examples include descriptions of group processes or decisions such as survey results, meeting minutes, resolutions passed by the group, priority lists developed by the group, etc.
• Review panelists often suspect that a letter of support may have been solicited by the proposal writer and provided by the stakeholder almost as a courtesy. This suspicion is stronger when several letters from different stakeholders contain very similar text. In this case, the letter or letters may be of little value in the grants competition.
• If a letter is the only way that a proposal addresses stakeholder-identified priority, reviewers may presume that the attributes discussed under “Access to the Priority” (above) are lacking.
• A letter of support may often be a valuable indicator of cooperation by individuals, which can be important in evaluating other attributes of a project, such as project design and chances for success.

Based on a document prepared by Jim VanKirk, Southern Region IPM Center