Introduction

This blog post tells you how to analyze a situation, and the effects it brings by proposing certain changes. It will help you in a debate or in a IELTS writing section.

Stakeholder Analysis

Stakeholder analysis is the habit of asking “Who is affected, how, and why?” before you build arguments. This works in both a debate and an IELTS Task 2 essay.

Let’s take this motion from as an example:

This House Would ban smoking on campus.

Or in an IELTS writing task:

A growing number of universities are restricting the places where smoking is permitted on campus.
Why is this the case?
Do you think this is a positive or a negative development?

What is happening?

• A number of people, students and staff, are smoking on campus.
  • Non-smokers might be affected, which might be the reason for introducing the motion, or why universities are restricting places for smoking.
• Universities are banning/restricting smoking on campus.

Who may be the possible key groups affected by this motion?

If we were to ban smoking on campus:

• The first group of people to be affected, or stakeholders, might be smokers.
  • They are being banned from smoking.
• If you’ve heard of “passive smoking“, another group of stakeholders could be non-smokers.
  • They inhale others’ smoke.
  • In the worst case, some individuals might be allergic to nicotine.
• The other group of stakeholders could be vendors who sell cigarettes.

How may the stakeholders be affected?

If we were to ban smoking on campus:

• Smokers might face difficulty in finding a place to smoke.
  • They might need to go to certain areas like a smoking area to smoke, or even have to leave campus.
• Non-smokers might have to inhale less of the smoke they don’t want to or they can’t.
  • As smoking might happen less on campus.
• Vendors who sell cigarettes might not be able to make profit from selling them.
  • As selling cigarettes could also be prohibited by universities in order to limit smoking.

What might they do?

• Smokers might sneak a smoke in some other places, sometimes even in public areas.
  • Non-smokers might suffer again.
• Vendors who sell cigarettes might sell them secretly in order to protect their profit.
  • Weakens the universities’ supervision on them.

Difference

Stakeholder analysis works the same way in both activities — the difference lies in what you do with it afterwards.

In a debate, your analysis feeds into a model: a concrete proposal that solves the problem the motion addresses. You need to explain the mechanism — how the policy works, why it helps the stakeholders you’ve identified, and why it outweighs the harms. There’s room to develop each argument at length and respond to the other side directly.

In an IELTS Task 2 essay, you’re doing something similar in spirit, but under tighter constraints. You still need to identify causes, effects, and competing interests — but instead of building a full mechanism, you need to select the most powerful points and express them concisely. Every argument has to pull its weight in a limited word count, so the analysis has to be sharper and more selective from the start.

In short: debate lets you build; IELTS asks you to distil.

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Now that we know who is affected and how, the next question is: whose interests matter more? That’s where weighing comes in — and it’s the subject of the next post.