Placing the Stakes: The Enactment of Territorial Stakeholders in Planning Processes

This paper is an investigation into processes of becoming-stakeholder. It focuses specifically on strategic spatial planning where the stakeholder concept has become one of the linchpins of much contemporary theory and practice. Through drawing upon the sociology of attachments and scholarship on subjectification, it is argued that the enactment of stakeholders in strategic planning processes can be gainfully understood as the production of stakeholder subjectivities by way of practices of ontological choreography which can generate territorial attachments and rearticulate existing attachments into a specifically territorial format. From this perspective, stakeholderness is never an ontologically pregiven property to be uncovered by diligent analysis. Rather, we might come to see that stakeholder subjectification is a process through which actors learn to be affected, and where these affections further come to be articulated as territorial attachments engendering, or at least prompting, a ‘caring for place’. Still, as relational effects, subjectivities are always potentially precarious achievements and it is important not to take for granted that the subjectivities enacted in a specific situation or setting will be easily transposable to other contexts.