Cultural Stakeholder Selection for Nation Branding Network Analysis

Stakeholder engagement is widely recognised as essential to successful nation branding. Yet stakeholders must first be selected before they can be mapped or engaged. This preliminary step is particularly important in the cultural dimension, where multiple domains and heterogeneous actors make stakeholder boundaries difficult to define. Poorly defined boundaries may lead network analysis to overlook actors and relationships that shape the nation brand. This conceptual paper examines how cultural stakeholders are selected for nation-branding analysis. An integrative literature review and scoping study covered six domains: literature and language, music, sport, food and drink, architecture, and religion. A Scopus search identified 212 publications; after screening, 20 studies that explicitly described stakeholder selection procedures were analysed through thematic coding. The review identified four recurring approaches: expertise-driven, role-based, case-embedded, and population-based. Drawing on nation-branding literature beyond the cultural domains covered by the review, the paper proposes an additional fifth approach, termed Emergent, for future research. The findings provide greater conceptual clarity and a shared language for discussing cultural stakeholder selection, supporting more transparent and comparable nation-branding network studies.