Identification and selection of stakeholder engagement strategies: case study of an Iranian oil and gas construction project

Despite emphasizing the great importance of stakeholder management, there is a gap in applying a decision support system to adopt sustainable strategies for stakeholder engagement and conflict resolution especially in oil and gas projects. This paper presents a new framework for adopting the strategies in one of the largest oil and gas projects in Iran. In this proposed framework, firstly, the hybrid SWOT analysis and fuzzy Delphi method are used to identify and rank the sustainable stakeholder engagement strategies for managing conflicts. Then, a mathematical programming model was proposed to select the optimal strategies to maximize stakeholder engagement. The findings indicate that the results of the hybrid SWOT analysis and fuzzy Delphi method and the mathematical programming model are the same and the high ranked strategies obtained by the hybrid SWOT analysis and fuzzy Delphi method are selected in the proposed mathematical programming model as well. Also, each selected strategy can cover more than one conflict and improve stakeholder engagement.