The purpose of this paper is to explore internal management, advocacy and partnerships of interest groups with the aim of representing their interests in public policy formation with a view to developing a stakeholder typology. This qualitative study involves eight in-depth, semi-structured interviews with representatives from stakeholder organisations acting in Lithuania's higher education sector. The developed typology, which includes the analysed factors of capacity (organisational capacity, learning capacity, partnership capacity and advocacy capacity), comprises a description of three levels (strong, medium and weak). The suggested typology is a tool that could be used by public institutions to assess the capacity of stakeholders.