Earning a social licence to operate (SLO): A conflicted praxis in sub-Saharan Africa's mining landscape?

Enhancing community development management and the management of social and environmental impacts to get social license to operate in the mining industry: A Peruvian case study

“…Proponents of SLO in mining believe that the commitment of company executives should be to meet the needs of local communities and community development through community benefits agreements (CBAs) and investments in CSR projects. In this way, company executives seek to gain the trust of community residents and earn SLO (Dauda, 2022). Cooper et al (2022) asserted that since its origins in the mining industry, the concept of SLO has been used to consider community acceptance of the mining presence; however, this acceptance is accompanied by the company's commitment to supporting community development through forestry practices (Edwards & Lacey, 2014), agricultural development (Shepheard & Martin, 2008) and manufacturing (Gunningham et al, 2004).…”

Social Licence to Operate

“…After its emergence, SLO gained traction in Australia, a central space for corporate-university relations and from where scholar-consultants have written peer-reviewed publications on informed consent (Macintyre 2007), corporate reports about development (Filer 2012) and more academic volumes about political ecology and corporate-community relations in general (Biersack & Greenberg 2006). From there, SLO narratives travelled with mining industry reps and researchers throughout wider Oceania, to Africa (Dauda 2022 Echoing Cooney's (2017, p. 200) description of the term's 'relative ambiguity, ' Owen (2016, p. 103) argues that SLO is 'perhaps the leading example of a term that in itself has no directly observable meaning'. Scholars have revealed the ways in which the slipperiness of a hegemonic term seems to add to its material weight and strategic usefulness (e.g.…”