Social licence – is it real and does it matter?

What is it?

Social licence.?It’s probably a term that many of us perceive as vague and overused, but what is it exactly and how important is it?

Loosely I guess, it is the willingness of a certain defined community to accept a particular project or proposal in its midst.

Three key definitions

Immediately we see there are three important definitions wrapped up in that – a definition of “accept”, a definition of “community”, and a definition of “project”.

What does “accept” mean in this context??Does it mean a vote or poll??If so, does a 51% result in favour represent “accept”??Does a non-unanimous vote in favour represent “accept”??Is it something between? How do we draw that line?

I am open to suggestions, but I suspect it means two things – firstly that the number of objectors within “the community” are not of a sufficient size to “per-se” disrupt the project’s profitable implementation or operation, and that secondly the number of supporters broadly outnumbers those who object.?That is to say, the supporters are the biggest group, and the non-supporters aren’t sufficiently against it to become an operational or financial problem.

What about “community” then??Who does that involve??There is the community that might reap the direct benefits of the project, including any employment.?There is the community that might need to suffer any adverse effects of the normal project operation.?Then there is the community that might be affected by any worst-case scenario problems, and there is the community that might enjoy indirect spin-off benefits.?

Who then is the community in question in this context??Well, I'd argue it’s all of these – but having a relatively clear definition of “accept” helps here.?Attention is focussed always on the most local directly affected community, but the attention also given to any wider community is really a function of their ability to disrupt profitable operation if not consenting.?That might seem harsh, but it seems the realpolitik of the situation.

The definition of “the project” is the easier bit, but there are nuances.?The definition of the project involves not just perceived costs and benefits, but timescales, understood insurances, guarantees, promises, and compensations if problems arise, and commitments to honest, trustworthy, auditable communication.

How important is it?

Well, given that our definition of “accept” involves project success and profitability, it is very important. The inference is that projects will struggle to be profitable if the level of opposition and disruption is beyond certain limits.

That in turn implies that is important to seek social licence and expend energy and time and money to achieve it. It also implies that if after reasonable efforts social licence does not look like occurring, there is a time to cut losses and walk away.?Not necessarily forever, but certainly for the time being.?A sense of diminishing returns and the dangers of throwing good money after bad.?If a community is dead against something, no amount of cash thrown at public relations will likely change it.

The importance and unimportance of logic

It is vitally important of course that any project proponents understand the logic of their own case for a project and endeavour to communicate it.?Without that any project is dead in the water. It would however be a mistake and almost inevitably a great frustration to think this is a sole necessary condition for obtaining social licence.?The logic is a required foundation but it is not enough for a successful project build in a community.

The most fundamental requirement beyond logic is trust.?A “community” according to our definition - bearing in mind this also encompasses direct shareholders - may or may not understand the logical case, but chances are that if it does not also trust the project’s integrity, credentials and the assertion of benefit, it will not occur.

I suspect as technical people, this resort to logic, as our own means of justifying things, is usually our go-to default isn’t it??We think mistakenly that if people are not yet persuaded, we need to go into ever deeper technical detail to prove our credentials and persuade of the logic.?However there are cases innumerable of where this has not been enough, simply because whatever the proposers say, they originate from a sector that rightly or wrongly the community does not trust.

A relationship between social licence and tax

Although we have defined our “project” in the first instance as quite a narrow field of operations for a particular geographically located activity, it is also possible to think of social licence in much wider and general terms.?Perhaps the best example of this is government raised taxes for particular purposes.?These can also in a sense be thought of as “projects”.?

It is fair to say that the social licence for this kind of project is also rooted in trust, and varies enormously from country to country and region to region.?Some countries have a fiercely libertarian anti-state tradition where even the mere mention of the word “tax” raises the shackles.?

Other countries have a long tradition of the opposite, where state funded expenditure for the greater good is widely accepted as the norm and deemed appropriate.?There may in those places be fierce debate about the particular way in which those taxes are spent, but the right of the government to raise them to quite significant levels is more or less accepted.?

That is certainly not true of everywhere though, and perhaps countries that have conflicted histories and lingering resentments from past civil wars are most likely to fall into this category.?In such places “trust” of central government is not in the same place.?That is not to criticise, it is just to make this central observation – that a government’s ability to raise taxes in a general sense for “projects” is also very much subject to widely varying degrees of social licence.

Authoritarianism and social licence

The astute will have already noticed that incorporating into our definition of “accept” the notion of a community’s ability to disrupt a project is also itself a function of the political regime style of a country.?In very authoritarian countries the ability of a “community” to “disrupt” profitable operation of a state approved project through its own objections is not zero – it is never zero – but it is very different, and very diminished, compared to that of a liberal democracy.?

Again, it is not to comment further on this, just to observe that social licence is a very different proposition in Xinjiang to what it is in the home counties.

A path to trust

We have already seen how to some extent project proposers and their supporting politicians can sometimes be distracted into thinking that social licence is only about exhaustive logical arguments.?The observation that trust is far more important is sometimes lost.?The concept that while an absence of logic is generally (sadly not always) a fatal flaw for a project, an absence of trust can scupper any amount of logic.

The key perhaps to trust is to abandon the illusion that it will be primarily rooted in anything the project proposers or supporting politicians have to say directly themselves.?That might sound totally counter-intuitive, but think on it – anything they say, regardless of their respective integrities, will always be a little bit vulnerable to the “but you would say that wouldn’t you…” kind of argument.

The better key into trust is perhaps the search for case study peers relevant to the audience being addressed.?"Referees" if you like. Whatever the style of the project being proposed, find the successful comparable case studies and link up the new-project community with their respective peers in existing projects.?Homeowners, business owners, schools, charities, faith leaders, local councillors, housing associations, and so on.?

Let them hear, warts and all, not from boffins or executives or PR professionals or politicians but from people like themselves in equivalent roles – precisely how things have gone in the compared case study project.?Benefits, costs, insurances, teething problems, communications, etc.?If there are no such case studies nationally, go international, employing translators and zoom (or equivalent) liberally.?

The caveat to this of course is the presumption that some precedents do actually exist somewhere.?If truly none do globally, that does make things trickier.?Then it becomes a search for that rare thing, a truly open minded pragmatic community willing to consider the new.?Wonderfully, they do exist, but finding one which matches any location restrictions on the “project” might make it tricky.?Perseverance and patience the watchword.

In summary

It’s probably reasonable to assert that sometimes we overestimate the scale of the “community” that needs to be persuaded for a “project” to occur.?Often if the local community is more or less persuaded that the project can be trusted, and is not openly objecting in any vociferous manner, it is enough.?

However, it is also important to recognise that social licence is indeed important, not to be taken for granted, and that trying to operate in the face of vigorous opposition from a local or wider community is rarely good business.?Even if the first project still manages to turn a profit in those circumstances, the damage done to future project potentials by long running vociferous opposition is highly detrimental and ultimately opportunity destructive.?

Social licence then, is often seemingly a project bane and often frustratingly illogical, but that said, the value to be had in obtaining community trust is hard to overstate.?Becoming habitual in its consideration a life skill for any serious business.?The role of promoting communications between peers from similar case studies – nationally and internationally – seems widely underutilised.?It is no guarantor of approval, but if approval is going to happen, it may be one of the fastest tracks to it.?