Pamela Lesser

‘Social license to operate’: a relevant term in Northern European mining?

The concept of social license to operate (SLO) is increasingly being used throughout the world to describe a specific aspect of company–community relations in resource-extractive projects, in particular how different actors interact to resolve, or not, the social and economic impacts on local communities and other stakeholders. This article will tease out the main elements of the SLO concept and examine the degree to which both actors (mining companies and communities), verbally and in action, respond toward one another. Based on previous empirical studies of scholars in the field, we have applied an analytical framework of SLO to empirically test whether or not it can provide greater insight into the motivations both behind a communitys acceptance of or opposition to a companys project, as well as the extent to which a company is willing to appease the public in order to gain their acceptance. The framework combines a set of normative criteria the company must meet as a precondition to gaining SLO, with different levels of community acceptance indicating the degree to which a community bestows SLO on the company. Eight case studies from the European north (two mining projects in each of the countries Norway, Finland, Russia, and Sweden) have been selected to test the SLO analytical framework in order to ultimately determine whether a companys specific SLO practices (i.e. active public engagement, sponsoring community projects, etc.) generate different levels of community acceptance. Although there are other contributing factors that affect company–community relations in the context of mining projects, most notably the legal and regulatory frameworks for resource-extractive projects, the goal of this article is to focus on the social and ethical dimensions of the company–community relationship.

Environmental impact assessment: introduction to a policy instrument manifesting sustainable development

It is generally understood that the first national EIA procedure established was the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA 1969, as amended) of the United States in 1969. Thereafter, the EIA procedure first spread to the commonwealth countries of Canada and Australia, and then to Europe and also to some developing countries (Gilpin 1995; Harrop and Nixon 1999). International banks like the World Bank or the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) started to make EIA a precondition for any loan they gave (Bastmeijer and Koivurova 2008, part 3). At the moment, practically all states have their EIA systems in place (Yang and Percival 2009). Even the transboundary EIA, an extension of domestic EIA to foreign states and other actors has, in the words of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) become