This paper introduces the concept of affective stakeholders, a mobilized form of affective publics whose engagement challenges core assumptions of stakeholder theory. Through a case study of Hawai‘i’s shark fishing policy, we trace how social media influencers recontextualized a government stakeholder engagement activity, transforming its purpose and catalyzing affect-laden processes that drove a wave of unintended participation. Most participants had no direct stake in the policy but were mobilized by narratives embedded with affect and misinformation. By co-opting government messaging, a small number of influencers leveraged social media affordances to activate affective publics who claimed stake in faraway decisions. This phenomenon was distributed and iterative, with no clearly responsible actor. We argue that affective stakeholders pose an emerging challenge to stakeholder theory and environmental governance, especially as participatory processes grow increasingly vulnerable to reinterpretation within volatile and affectively charged online networks.

Aloha, my name is Kapono Gaughen. In 2015 I began making videos with my friends sharing our fishing trips, which we posted on YouTube. This ended up having a much larger impact on me than I would have ever expected. On my channel, a community of such stakeholders had self-organized. Could the marketing practices used to connect online communities with businesses work in a resource management setting? I am now here with the CIS program, seeking to understand how social media, online communities, and the environment interact and might benefit one another.