Who are the stakeholders involved in the management and conservation of the eel? What roles do they play? And, how do they relate to each other?

One of SUDOANG’s objectives is to strengthen the cooperation among stakeholders involved in the governance of the eel and its habitat, by improving coordination and communication between eel managers at different levels and sectors and exploring new management approaches. One of these new approaches is the proposal of an Eel Governance Platform.

The structure and composition of the Platform was started with the preparation of a Stakeholder Map for each of the 10 pilot basins of SUDOANG. The Lonxanet Foundation has identified, classified and analyzed the role of all stakeholders involved in eel management and conservation, after consulting river basin leaders and experts or users in each basin.

The Stakeholder Map is a tool to improve the relational understanding among the stakeholders affected to a greater or lesser extent by the management of the eel because:

• it facilitates a more comprehensive analysis of the roles and interrelationships played by the different actors at the local, regional, national and international levels.
• it provides valuable information to know the extent of collaboration or rejection at the basin level.
• it allows establishing the link between the first local level and the national/international levels in the process of creating a multi-level Governance Platform to support the management of the eel.

The Stakeholders Map can always be enriched over time as it can be fed with new relevant information. Once the local level is completed, the next step will be to design a Stakeholder Map at different administrative levels (regional, national and international) and analyze the links between them as a means of defining the structure and composition of the multi-level governance platform.