What is the social licence?

The social licence is essentially the degree of social acceptability of an organization and its activities.

Social acceptability depends on who is in your social environment and what they want.

The core insight contained in the social licence concept is that an organization’s stakeholders have the power to limit or halt its actions. This implies that power is distributed throughout society. To complicate things, power is constantly being shifted among actors as rights and responsibilities get renegotiated at all scales of interaction, from the local to the global. Occasionally, power gets concentrated in one place. In those cases, the social licence gets distorted to fit the preferences of the organization or coalition that dominates all the others (Boutilier, 2019).

The social licence enjoyed by an organization for its activities can vary from high support to high opposition. Usually the extreme supporters and extreme opponents are more politically organized and active than those who grant social licences characterized by ambivalence and conditional support or opposition.

Some stakeholders make it their primary goal to deny a social licence to specific activities.

Who grants the social licence?

In theory vs in practice

Theoretically, everyone grants everyone else a high or low level of social licence. The interlocking web of mutual permissions and constraints, both explicit and implicit, constitute the social contract. In what we generally recognize as a strong social contract, the web has a cohesive core with a smooth gradient of connectedness to the periphery. There are many different ways the web can deviate from that ideal. There are many different ways a social contract can be flawed.

Practically, the power to withhold a social licence usually requires a coalition of organizations and/or institutions. An example might be a political office implementing a policy change preferred by the politician’s coalition of supporters.

Because not every organization cares what all other organizations are doing, a practical view of the social licence identifies the organization’s stakeholders as the grantors. Stakeholders are those groups (or individuals) (a) who are either affected or potentially affected by the organization’s activities, or (b) who choose, or are likely to choose, to have an impact upon the organization’s activities. Criterion (b) means that stakeholders can self declare. For example, if a criminal group decides to make an extortion threat against an international development aid NGO, then that criminal group becomes one of the NGO’s stakeholder’s. Organizations can choose which stakeholder they want to engage with proactively, in which case they are choosing to make themselves stakeholders of those groups. However, other groups can do the same to them. In sociological terms, agency resides with all parties simultaneously.

How do you get a social licence?

To simplify, there are two main ways of getting a social licence (i.e., social acceptability). First, trusting relationship can be established with those stakeholders who already have the power and influence necessary to restrict access to the resources needed for the activity (e.g., banks, unions, environmental protestors, etc.). Second, stakeholders, including the general public, can be convinced to take for granted a positive story about the organization and its activities. This might be done by cultivating a positive organizational reputation and/or by promoting the acceptance of a narrative that grants the organization and its activity a high degree of legitimacy, credibility, and trustworthiness.

More research is needed to understand how relationships and narratives, interact to produce a given level of social licence. There are probably a lot a circumstantial variables that determine which one will have more impact in any specific situation.

References:

Boutilier, R. G. (2019). How inter-sectoral power relations change the meaning of the social licence. Paper presented at the 9th international conference on Sustainable Development in the Minerals Industry. May 27 to 29, Sydney, The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy.