As you mentioned, in declarative pipeline you can use the when directive to establish a condition in which the stage will be executed.
Among the built in condition options like triggeredBy,branch and tag there is the generic expression option, which allows you to run any groovy code and calculate the relevant Boolean value according to your needs.
So for your case for example you can just use the groovy contains methods to achieve what you want, something like:
pipeline {
agent any
stages {
stage('Conditional Stage') {
when {
expression { return env.MyParamter.contains('MySubstring') }
}
steps {
echo "Running the conditional stage"
}
}
}
}