Abstract
The assessment of stakeholders' interests is a critical step in consensus building processes in social infrastructure development. The coordinator of these processes needs to pay attention to both concrete interests and deeper concerns behind them for successful consensus building. The authors have engaged in the management of the consensus building process for the Ten-noh river restoration project carried out on Sado Island, Niigata, and have successfully developed a restoration plan by combining voices from different perspectives. One of the key conditions for the successful consensus building is to incorporate stepby-step problem solving processes responding to the issues identified by stakeholders. Such a steady approach leads to the consensus of the project as a whole. The authors have developed a framework to analyze the structure of consensus building processes in details by establishing a chart that layouts stakeholder's opinions, interests, deeper concerns, and concrete issues that arise when promoting a project of social infrastructure development.
