America’s Marine Highway stakeholders: a system-scale analysis of influence in decision making

This work surveys stakeholders of America’s Marine Highway to identify their perceived influence on each other’s resource allocation decision making. The value/criticality of the resource held by the stakeholder group can be indirectly measured by the influence exerted by the group on its peers and its external stakeholders. The stakeholder map visualizes how the various stakeholder groups influence each other. Survey of the US Marine Highway stakeholders reveals peers as the most dominant influence among shippers, environmental advocates, and regulators. Results suggest that only suppliers and transportation providers exhibit distinct dominance of customer-supplier influence over that of their peers. This snapshot of stakeholder relationships is a powerful tool for both businesses as well as regulators in their pursuit of shared objectives in a network-centric environment. Stakeholder relationship influence results, and their graphical illustration, contribute to understanding the underlying dynamics of a changing value advantage in the current and coming decades of shipping.