Scales of trust: an exploration of the social licence to operate of mining at the societal level

This thesis is an exercise in theory building around the function of SLO at the societal scale. A well-established concept applied at the scale of local communities, research on the nature of SLO at the societal scale is still at a nascent stage. There are many reasons for this including the challenge of defining who comprises ‘society,’ whether trust can underlie a relationship between society and industry given the complexity of actors, and the blurring of the SLO concept itself as a private governance mechanism given the levers of change involve policy makers and legislation. There also exists an ideological obstacle, as some academics hesitate to explore scales beyond the community because it suggests a possible diluting of social licence as it is understood, that power lies in a community as it does in government. To delve more deeply into these issues, the research begins with the proposition that SLO is a concept with the community-company relationship at its core, but that it is scalable, meaning the drivers, actors and relationship-building goals can be scaledup from the community level to the societal level. This idea has been operationalised via development of the Scalar SLO Model, which integrates within a single model the drivers of acceptance and loss at both scales. In so doing, the model ultimately allows testing both intra- and inter-scales to address the objective of the thesis, explaining the mechanism behind the functioning of societal SLO and to determine its relevance for a community’s acceptance of a mining project.

The community and societal scales are integrated in the model through shared drivers of gaining or losing trust and acceptance. As the drivers of community SLO can be scaled up to also function as the drivers of societal SLO, so too are the roles that trust and acceptance play. Where a company must build a relationship with a community based on trust for there to be acceptance of a project, so too must industry build a trust-based relationship with society for there to be acceptance of the mining industry. One important difference between the Scalar SLO Model and other models is the incorporation of government as a foundational driver both at the community and societal scales. Previously, government was theorised to have a role in SLO, albeit undefined, only at scales beyond the community.

The research is situated in Europe, where welfare democracies have positioned the state to act as the gatekeeper of mining acceptance and where the majority of societal level research and practice on SLO has been undertaken. Testing of the Scalar SLO Model reveals that the drivers and roles of trust and acceptance do not scale neatly. This has provoked a re-thinking of SLO as a scalar concept to one more contingent on the satisfaction of preconditions and drivers. Government and its associated legal and regulatory frameworks are not, as originally assumed, the foundational driver of societal SLO but rather a precondition for the relationship-building between industry and society to then begin. In Europe, fulfilment of the preconditions is a large part of developing trust and acceptance.

Development of the Scalar SLO Model is rooted in the extant SLO models with additional research on trust-building in Finland and Spain. The subsequent testing of the model to determine the accuracy of the drivers and the influence between scales necessitated a further refinement of the individual drivers at each scale. These more nuanced drivers allow for the testing of the interactions and influences of the scales themselves, both in terms of the effect scale has on SLO and the effects different scales have on one another. The outcomes are a result of utilizing multiple methods consisting of both qualitative and semi-quantitative data analysis.

The model and the thesis in general respond to the quickly evolving discourse and legislative actions now taking place in Europe. From 2008 when raw materials first appeared on the European Commission’s agenda to the present day, the importance of incentivising critical and strategic raw materials production for the energy transition has leapt to the top of the Commission’s policy priorities. The lightning-fast process of adopting the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) is the clearest demonstration of this. Incentivising mining and gaining a social licence are not, however, the same. Concerns as to the loose environmental and social standards in the CRMA have already been voiced by civil society. With the sufficiency of the preconditions questionable, efforts by the mining industry to build relationships with the broader public are not likely to succeed and tensions around mining activities will probably increase.

What began as an enquiry into SLO as a two-tiered concept of community scale and societal scale, where the broad-gauge public acceptance of the mining industry was thought to be important for the local acceptance of mining projects, has resulted in several surprising findings. The first is that societal and community SLO are each comprised of preconditions and drivers with good governance and strong legal frameworks being the preconditions at the societal scale. It is not clear what the preconditions for the community scale are precisely as the research focuses on the functioning of societal SLO, but it is clear they exist and are related to governance. Fulfilment of these preconditions are necessary before the trust-building work industry must subsequently undertake with society, based on the drivers, can begin. The second finding is that SLO at the societal scale is not important for the local acceptance of a project. What matters for acceptance is the community-company relationship and the ability to negotiate issues that happen at the site level. Societal acceptance plays a supportive role to community acceptance and is dependent on it. The third finding is that because the reconditions are so important at the societal level, there is little room for the mining industry to build relationships with the general citizenry because there are fewer benefits that industry has the power to negotiate. This could change over time, for example, if the public feels the preconditions are adequate and they demand more from industry. For now, however, the space for relationship-building in Europe is minimal.