People in government, business, and political and civil society organisations routinely talk about 'stakeholders'. They do exercises in stakeholder analysis to inform their 'strategic planning'. Invariably they use the stakeholder language to advertise claims about the inclusivity of their thinking, their processes, and their practice. The organisation we work with [Church Land Programme (CLP)] was asked recently to prepare an input for a 'stakeholder analysis' for a collegial NGO and this forced us to reflect on why we were so uncomfortable with the very idea. We presented some of our thinking as the basis for discussions at the NGO meeting. It was good that there was a mix of people there including grassroots militants as well as civil society employees.

The note below includes some thoughts we had prepared, as well as things we learned from people at the meeting. It outlines why we conclude that the stakeholder discourse, and the practices that go along with it, are in fact part of an order that functions to exclude and silence. For those at the meeting who came from grassroots formations, it was clear that this approach fitted very much with their analysis and experience. Summarising their key points, it was said that the stakeholder approaches exclude, enslave, silence and demobilise. The combined effect is to try and reduce their struggles to what can be managed within the terms set by the rich and powerful.

STAKEHOLDERS = THOSE WHO COUNT and EMANCIPATORY POLITICS = MADE BY THE UNCOUNTED

By definition, stakeholders must mean those people or groups who are recognised as having a stake in something. Part of CLP's evolving way of understanding the world we're in has meant moving decisively away from the assumption that we get toward good praxis by analysing, and working with, relations with 'stakeholders'. It's not that we think stakeholders don't matter – on the contrary, they constitute 'what is' and they therefore affect a lot of things that people have to deal with. But they cannot constitute spaces for a liberatory politics. The 'stakeholders' are those who are counted and who are qualified to speak – their counting, qualifications and speaking being constituted by and within the terms of the existant order (of 'the police' as Rancier would have it). A liberatory politics is the opposite – it is precisely the disruption of those terms by those who are not counted, not qualified, and therefore, should not be speaking. In short: naming the stakeholders is in order – liberatory praxis is the 'out of order' of those who do not qualify to be stakeholders.