By Angélique

Stakeholder mapping is an approach that involves identifying, analyzing, and visualizing all the actors (internal and external) that influence or are impacted by your activity. It's an essential steering tool for understanding the relationships, interdependencies, and cooperative dynamics within a shared ecosystem.

Within a circular economy strategy, this approach takes on even greater importance because it reveals the flows of value, resources, and information between actors and identifies collective levers to reduce impacts and create value together.

What you should remember:

  • Stakeholder mapping is a strategic method for understanding and steering your ecosystem.
  • The Partner Map tool lets you analyze relationships and interdependencies between actors at two scales: geographic and value chain.
  • A good mapping should reveal where value, tensions, or synergies are created, in order to build more lasting, circular cooperation.

The Circulab method: an innovative mapping approach

In an environment where value chains are increasingly complex and interdependent, understanding your ecosystem of actors has become essential.

That's exactly what our stakeholder mapping method and tool are designed to do: making visible the relationships, flows, and cooperation opportunities within a project or organization.

Understanding your stakeholders as an ecosystem

Most companies identify their stakeholders without truly visualizing their interconnections. Yet an organization functions like a living system, where every actor (a customer, a supplier, or otherwise) interacts with and influences the others.

In this article, we provide a tool that lets you:

This systemic vision is at the heart of the Circular Design method we've developed. In creating this methodology, we wanted to help organizations think in networks and as a collective rather than in silos, an essential condition for any successful circular economy strategy.

What the Partner Map tool enables

The Partner Map isn't just a static mapping. It's a participatory tool that fosters dialogue between a project's stakeholders.

During a workshop, teams identify together the key actors, their roles, their expectations, and the relationships that connect them. This collective process offers several benefits:

It's a powerful approach for mobilizing teams around a shared goal, whether designing a new circular model, deploying a CSR strategy, or improving the resilience of an ecosystem.

A key tool of our Circular Design method

Developed and used for more than ten years in projects with numerous organizations, the Partner Map is one of the three key tools of the Circulab method, alongside the Circular Canvas and the Value Chain Canvas.

Together, these tools help you, among other things:

Each tool fits into a broader Circular Design approach that helps organizations:

Far from theoretical, these tools help you move into action by simplifying complexity, clarifying everyone's role, and fostering the co-creation of shared solutions.

A bonus: they're free, so don't hesitate to download them from our dedicated page.

Why map your stakeholders?

In a world where value chains are interconnected and social, environmental, and economic challenges are increasingly complex, no company can evolve alone.

Mapping your stakeholders means understanding who influences your business, what their interests are, and how to cooperate sustainably to create shared value.

A lever for business transformation

Stakeholder mapping isn't just a communication or CSR compliance exercise. It's a strategic governance tool that helps companies:

For a company engaged in the circular transition, this approach also helps identify where the concrete levers for action lie. Should we turn to reuse? Pool resources? Innovate collectively?

Anticipating risks and strengthening resilience

Good ecosystem mapping lets you spot fragilities and vulnerabilities before they turn into a crisis. By incorporating analysis criteria like level of influence, decision-making power, or mutual dependence, it becomes a valuable tool for:

In this light, stakeholder mapping perfectly complements risk analysis and strategic planning tools.

Creating circular, shared value

In a circular economy logic, value is no longer created linearly.

It must instead emerge from a network of interdependent actors: suppliers, users, local authorities, repairers, logistics providers, reuse partners, and so on. The Partner Map tool helps you visualize these value loops precisely:

This mapping reveals invisible synergies, opens new cooperation perspectives, and aligns each actor's interests toward a shared goal, whether economic, social, and/or environmental.

Key steps to build an effective mapping

As you'll have understood, a good mapping should help the company understand how each actor contributes to or reacts to its decisions and, above all, how to build more constructive, lasting relationships.

Here are the four essential steps to design a useful, operational mapping.

Identify all stakeholders

It all starts with an exploration phase. Here, you'll list all the internal and external actors who interact, directly or indirectly, with your business. This includes:

If you use the Partner Map, identification happens at two complementary scales:

This dual reading gives you a detailed, concrete view of your ecosystem, essential for any circular economy strategy.

Analyze their expectations, influence, and interdependencies

Once the actors are identified, you need to understand their roles, interests, and interactions. The analysis aims to answer a series of structuring questions rooted in systems thinking:

These questions let you go beyond a simple logic of power or interest to understand the real structure of the system (imbalances, complementarities, etc.).

By visualizing these elements, the Partner Map reveals areas of tension, potential synergies, and cooperation opportunities. You'll often discover that an actor perceived as secondary can actually play a strategic role in the circular loop.

Visualize the links with the Partner Map

This is the key step where complexity becomes readable. The Partner Map offers a clear, interactive representation of the system, with actors positioned according to their role, proximity, and relationships.

This visualization lets you:

During a Circulab workshop, this step becomes a moment of collective awareness, where everyone concretely visualizes the interconnections between the value chain's actors and the possible room for improvement to reduce impacts and create more shared value.

Keeping the mapping alive

A stakeholder mapping is an evolving tool that you shouldn't hesitate to revisit regularly. Why? Because your ecosystem changes with new partners, new regulations, and new uses, for example.

This dynamic approach turns the mapping into a true steering tool, letting you measure how cooperation evolves, adjust your circular economy strategies to the local context, and maintain an ongoing dialogue with key stakeholders.

Classic methods and their limits

Before adopting a tool like the Partner Map, it's useful to understand how stakeholder mapping is usually approached in organizations.

So-called "classic" approaches from project management or corporate governance have helped structure relationships between actors. However, in an interdependent world subject to planetary boundaries, these models quickly reach their limits.

The most widespread approaches

In this section, we won't give an exhaustive overview of every method, but rather highlight the most common ones.

RACI analysis

Widely used in project management, the RACI method helps define roles and responsibilities:

This approach is very useful because it clarifies internal decision-making circuits. However, it doesn't account for external relationships, interdependencies, or the cooperative dynamics needed for sustainability.

The Salience Model

Developed by Mitchell, Agle, and Wood, this approach identifies stakeholders based on three criteria:

In short, it helps prioritize actors according to the attention they should be given. Its main limitation is that it's poorly suited to complex, evolving systems. Like RACI, it doesn't account for cooperation or value flows between actors.

The Mendelow power/interest matrix

This is the most widespread method. Very simply, it consists of classifying stakeholders along two dimensions:

This approach helps prioritize communication by monitoring actors with low influence and low interest, informing those with interest but no influence, involving those with moderate influence, and closely managing those with high influence and high interest. Unfortunately, this method remains static and hierarchical. Once again, it doesn't show how actors interact or what value they create together.

Their limits in complex systems

In a circular economy approach, the boundaries between producers, users, and partners become blurred. A supplier can become a reuse partner, a local authority can facilitate resource pooling.

However, classic methods tend not to properly reveal possible flows or synergies.

The Partner Map, at the heart of our method, offers a systemic, dynamic vision. This approach doesn't just rank actors. It shows how they interact, where value is created, and how to strengthen cooperation. Of course, it can be useful to use the Partner Map alongside other complementary approaches. It all depends on your project's objective and your specific challenge.

Choosing the right method for your objectives

As mentioned above, there isn't just one way to map your stakeholders. The choice of method depends primarily on your objectives, your approach's maturity level, and the complexity of your ecosystem.

Some approaches are ideal for prioritizing or communicating, while others let you analyze, connect, and activate interactions in all their richness.

Adapting your method to your context

Before choosing your tool, take the time to ask yourself three key questions:

Once this framework is set, it becomes easier to select the right method.

In short

Stakeholder mapping isn't just an analysis or communication exercise. We can think of it as a true strategic compass, one that helps you understand the relationships that structure your business, reveal invisible dependencies, and strengthen your collective capacity to act.

By placing cooperation at the heart of governance, it becomes a real lever for lasting performance, because more alignment and less waste means more shared value created. With the Partner Map and the Circulab method, you can better understand an ecosystem and identify collaboration opportunities.

To conclude this article, we can say that the mapping exercise isn't just observation. It's learning to cooperate differently. And in a world where economic, social, and ecological challenges are closely linked, knowing how to connect actors rather than pit them against each other becomes a strategic skill.