MPH-503 Week 5 Stakeholder Mapping and Feasibility: How to Write It

What MPH-503 Week 5 asks for

A bill requiring hospitals to notify a designated community agency before discharging an older adult to an unlicensed residential arrangement draws an unexpected room. The family caregiver organization that requested it is there. So is the hospital association, worried about liability and length of stay. So is the association of licensed operators, which likes anything that pushes referrals toward licensed beds. So is a public employee union whose members would do the notifying and who wants staffing language attached. The county budget office has sent someone to listen. And the committee chair, who will decide whether the bill is heard at all, has not said a word. Six actors, four different reasons for being in the room, and one person whose silence outweighs everyone else's testimony.

That is the object of a stakeholder analysis. The core apparatus is simple and unforgiving: for each actor, their position on your proposal, the power they can bring to bear, and the salience of the issue to them. The third column is the one students skip and the one that predicts behaviour, because a powerful actor who does not care will not spend anything, while a modest actor for whom this is the only issue of the year will spend everything. Position, power and salience together tell you who to negotiate with, who to neutralize, who to recruit and who to ignore.

Veto point analysis is the other half. Legislative processes are obstacle courses: committee referral, a chair's discretion over the calendar, fiscal committee review where anything with a price goes to die, floor scheduling, the second chamber, executive signature, and then the rulemaking that determines whether the statute means anything. Regulatory and budget routes have their own gates. Naming the specific points where your proposal could stop, and who controls each, is the analytic spine of this paper, and it is the section that separates a graduate feasibility analysis from a list of supporters and opponents.

Expect a written analysis, sometimes accompanied by a visual map, and often paired with a posted element. Whatever the format, the strongest submissions do one thing consistently: they treat opponents as rational actors pursuing legible interests. Opposition written as ignorance or bad faith produces a strategy that cannot work, and a grader who has spent time near a legislature will read it as inexperience.

The MPH-503 Week 5 method, step by step

Seven moves for a stakeholder and feasibility analysis with operational value.

1. Fix the decision and the venue before listing anyone

   A committee vote, an agency rulemaking, a budget amendment and a county board resolution have entirely different casts. The actor inventory is meaningless until the decision it surrounds is named.

2. Inventory actors in four categories

   Decision-makers, influencers, implementers and those affected. The fourth group is routinely omitted, and it is the one with the strongest moral claim and usually the least organized capacity to press it.

3. Score position, power and salience separately

   Position from strong support to strong opposition, power in terms of what they can actually do, salience in terms of how much this matters against everything else on their desk. Three columns, no blending.

4. Map the veto points in sequence

   Walk the proposal from introduction to implementation and name every gate and its gatekeeper. The earliest gate controlled by an actor who is opposed and cares is where your campaign actually happens.

5. Design the coalition around complementary assets

   Partners bring different things: constituency, technical credibility, money, media access, or standing with a particular member. Say what each partner contributes and what they will want in return, since coalitions have prices.

6. Write a concession ladder before you need it

   List what you would give up in order: implementation delay, scope narrowed to larger operators, a pilot in selected counties, a reporting requirement in place of a mandate. Knowing your order in advance is what prevents a coalition from conceding its core in a corridor.

7. Deliver a feasibility verdict with a timing claim

   Not viable this session, viable in a narrowed form, or viable if a named condition changes. Attach the cycle: budget calendar, election timing, or the release of a report that would move the problem stream.

A layout and word budget for a feasibility analysis

Our frame for a stakeholder and feasibility assessment, sized for roughly 1,100 to 1,400 words plus any table. It is our own outline rather than anything the university issues, and your week's scoring guide outranks it wherever they disagree.

Evidence craft for political analysis

Source every position to a public record. Written testimony, comment letters, association position statements, floor remarks and published legislative analyses are all citable. A position you infer from an organization's general interests is a hypothesis, and labelling it as one is the honest move that also protects your argument.

Use lobbying and disclosure registries where they exist. Many jurisdictions publish registered lobbying activity, client lists and campaign finance filings. These are public data about who is spending attention on what, and they support claims about salience that would otherwise be speculation.

Describe interests, not motives. Write that an association representing operators has a financial interest in referral volume, which is documented and neutral. Do not write that its leadership does not care about residents, which is an accusation about people you have not interviewed and cannot support.

Distinguish stated positions from revealed ones. An organization can testify in support of a goal while opposing every instrument that would achieve it, and noticing that gap is one of the more sophisticated observations available in this stage. Evidence it with the record rather than with characterization.

Keep your own professional relationships out of the citations. If you know an actor's position because you sit in meetings with them, that is not a citable source and using it can expose confidential deliberations. Find the public version of the position, or write the actor generically and say the position is inferred.

Five mistakes that cost points in this week's territory

• A stakeholder list with no power column. Naming everyone who cares without saying what any of them can do produces a roster rather than an analysis.
• Opposition treated as ignorance. If your strategy is that opponents will change their minds once informed, you have not identified their interest.
• Executive branch actors omitted. Agency leadership, budget officers and legal counsel shape what is possible long before a vote, and they are missing from most student maps.
• No veto points. A feasibility analysis without gates and gatekeepers cannot say where the campaign should spend anything.
• Public education as the strategy. Awareness is not a mechanism for moving a committee chair, and proposing it in place of a route through the process reads as avoidance.

Before you submit

• The decision sought and the deciding body are named precisely
• Every actor carries a position, a power assessment and a salience assessment
• Affected populations appear as actors, not only as beneficiaries
• Each veto point has a named gatekeeper
• The concession ladder states what you would not trade and why
• Every reference appears in the text and every in-text citation appears in the list

Questions students ask about this stage

Keep going