Cultural Stakeholder Selection for Nation Branding Network Analysis

Stakeholder engagement is widely recognised as a key condition for successful nation branding. However, an important methodological issue remains largely overlooked: before stakeholders can be mapped or engaged, they must first be selected. This challenge is particularly relevant in the cultural dimension of nation branding, where multiple cultural domains and a heterogeneous set of actors make defining stakeholder boundaries difficult. This conceptual paper addresses how cultural stakeholders are selected for nation branding network analysis. An integrative literature review and scoping study were conducted across six cultural domains associated with nation branding: literature, music, sport, food and drinks, architecture, and religion. A Scopus search identified 212 publications. After applying the inclusion criteria, only studies that explicitly described stakeholder selection procedures were retained, resulting in a final sample of 23 full papers, which were analysed using thematic coding. Five recurring stakeholder selection approaches emerged: expertise-driven, role-based, case-embedded, population-based, and emergent. The findings suggest that stakeholder selection is often implicit and context-dependent, limiting transparency and comparability across studies. The paper contributes by shifting attention from stakeholder mapping to stakeholder selection and proposing a conceptual framework for future nation branding network analyses.