Is the social licence a real thing?

November 2, 2020   

The social licence began as a metaphor with the legal licences required in mining. Then it morphed into a quantifiable management tool for obtaining and tracking the social acceptability of a company’s operations. Today, political actors have started using the term as a way to imply that their favoured policies are more legitimate than those of their opponents. As it has been dragged through the mud of politics, the term ‘social licence’ has been labelled everything from corporate PR spin to undemocratic, leftist propaganda.

This video shows the conditions under which political actors will attribute different characteristics to the social licence in order to gain an advantage over their rivals. The video is loosely based on my publication in the journal  The Extractive Industries and Society (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2020.05.022)

It’s a longer video because it includes some review the academic literature on the social licence: