Understanding the fundamentals of the Social Licence to Operate: Its evolution, current state of development and future avenues for research
Introduction
Changes in societal expectations in recent decades have influenced how natural resource extractive industries conduct their operations around the world. Increasingly, communities are demanding involvement in the decision-making of these operations and expecting not only to receive a greater share of the benefits, but also to demand assurances that operations are being properly regulated (Bunnell, 2013). In this context, the social licence to operate (SLO) occupies a growing space in the discourse of various sectors as an element of its social responsibility strategy. With a central idea being that a community can give or withdraw support for a project, the social licence concept originated primarily from an industry perspective, where a business case was identified for properly considering social impacts and perspectives and managing ‘social risks’; thus, there is substantial research developed around the concept from this perspective (Moore, 1996; Owen and Kemp, 2013).
SLO is widely applied in the mining sector (Esteves and Barclay, 2011; Moffat and Zhang, 2014) and is increasingly gaining traction in other productive activities such as silviculture (Ford and Williams, 2016; Lester, 2016), oil and gas (Luke, 2017), the marine sector (Cullen-Knox et al., 2017; Kelly et al., 2017), energy (Gallois et al., 2017), and within the industries of the new Blue Economy, an ocean-based economic growth model involving the private sector (Voyer and van Leeuwen, 2019). More recently, the term has been used in new sectors such as biosecurity (Ogilvie et al., 2019), sports organisations (Miller, 2016), and biotechnology (Thresher et al., 2019). In the minerals sector particularly, recent socio-environmental catastrophes involving the rupture of the Brazilian tailings dams at the cities of Mariana, in 2015, and Brumadinho, in 2019, have further heightened interest in SLO, with these cases highlighting the vulnerability of communities around mineral projects, as well as that of the perpetuity of companies themselves who do not properly address the risks of their operations (e.g. Demajorovic et al., 2019; Mazzola and Esteves, 2018).
Since SLO is a fairly recent theoretical construction, a relatively small quantity of systematic literature reviews have been dedicated to understanding its conceptual evolution and implications for management practices. Gupta and Kumar (2018), through a systematic literature review of 104 articles from 31 academic journals, show that SLO is an emerging concept for many areas, and that a better understanding of this phenomenon is an important research gap to be filled. This study attempts to bring a deeper understanding of the theoretical basis supporting SLO studies, showing its evolution over time, how it is being used on current research, and future directions to help fill this research gap.
In terms of relatively recent reviews, Brueckner and Eabrasu (2018) address the normative complexity of SLO and propose the need for further conceptual analysis in future studies. Karakaya and Nuur (2018), in a systematic review of social sciences in the mineral sector, present SLO as one of the top five terms cited in social sector research, highlighting the small number of researchers present in countries with the largest mineral reserves, and point to the need for future studies to expand research on social issues within the mineral sector. Luke et al. (2018) conducted a thematic review of 90 academic articles and 23 reports on SLO in the Australian energy context, identifying substantial knowledge gaps, including understanding the evolution of SLO in space and time.
This study distinguishes itself from these contributions by choosing to discuss SLO in depth and globally, over time. A multi-method approach combines a systematic literature review with longitudinal content analysis; citations; co-citations; and social network analysis, which can together support the development of a deeper, longitudinal understanding of the SLO research fielde (Lievrouw, 1990). Additionally, we seek to understand how networks in SLO research form by the creation of ‘invisible colleges’ (Price, 1963). This is particularly important for SLO studies, which were initially drawn together from knowledge produced within different fields of knowledge. From the first technical bulletins (Joyce and Thomson, 2000) to the contribution of the legal perspective (Thornton et al., 2003), SLO debate has advanced to the development of management and measurement models which have become quite influential in the literature (Bice et al., 2017; Luke, 2017; Moffat and Zhang, 2014; Prno, 2013; Thomson and Boutilier, 2011).
In more recent times, studies on SLO address a critical perspective focused on the limits of this strategy. An overvaluation of it as a concept (Owen and Kemp, 2013) is identified as potentially masking complexities and power relationships between companies, governance, and communities (Meesters and Behagel, 2017). Other recent publications contain further analysis of complexities within the field, drawing on new case studies to develop and refine management tools and conceptual understandings of SLO (e.g. Demajorovic et al., 2019; Luke et al., 2018).
The objective of this paper is to describe the processes of SLO evolution from 1996 to 2019. To this end, the research seeks to identify and understand the theoretical body supporting the concept; the rationality of the trajectories adopted for its scientific development; and to identify the most influential studies guiding those trajectories.
This study is organised into four sections, with the first being this introduction; the second section presents the methodological procedures; the third section the results and trends; with the final section concluding the study and suggesting trajectories for future research in this field.
Section snippets
Methodological procedures
The study of informal collaborative networks and invisible colleges (Burt, 1977; Price, 1963) that constitute a field of research, such as SLO, can contribute significantly to understandings of its historical and intellectual roots. Presenting a picture of its evolutionary development and current dynamics (Culnan, 1986) can make a significant contribution to the direction of a field, identifying prospects for future studies (Culnan, 1986, 1987; Culnan et al., 1990; Price, 1965).
A radiograph of the research: a descriptive analysis
SLO emerges as a recent phenomenon in literature. Cited in 1996 for the first time in technical bulletins (Moore, 1996), it gains relevance particularly from 2011 when the number of publications accelerates considerably (Fig. 1).
The growing volume of publications, besides being consistent and significant, accompanies a change in mining discourse regarding the need for extractive companies to gain social acceptance of their operations in order to reduce their costs and conflicts (Franks et al.,
SLO trends and conclusions
The evolution of SLO using a longitudinal systematic review over 24-years, along with citation and co-citation analysis, social network analysis, and bibliometric techniques, identifies trends in research flows, showing how researchers working in the SLO space merged their experiences from disassociated clusters, with increasing density being added to the theoretical body in the last six years. The organisation and analysis of this knowledge has made the tracing of SLO trends possible, helping
Endnotes
1The search was performed with articles published until December 31, 2019.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Ana Lúcia Santiago: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation. Jacques Demajorovic: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation. Dennys Eduardo Rossetto: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Hanabeth Luke: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Data curation.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank our funders (1) Technology and Innovation for Sustainability Managing of Vale Company; (2) National Council for the Improvement of Higher Education–CAPES from the Brazilian Ministry of Education (Grant n° 88882.317243/2019-01 PNPD/CAPES), (3) The University Center of FEI, and (4) all reviewers and people who contributed with their suggestions and feedbacks.
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