A social licence to operate legitimacy test: Enhancing sustainability through contact quality - Laboratoire Métis
Article Dans Une Revue Journal of Cleaner Production Année : 2021

A social licence to operate legitimacy test: Enhancing sustainability through contact quality

Résumé

The social licence to operate is a notoriously ambiguous concept that encompasses a patent normative heterogeneity, making the emergence of a widely accepted standard capable of settling controversies on its legitimate use seem unlikely. To cope with this issue, the article builds a model (adapted from Arnstein’s ladder of public participation) to measure “contact quality,” used here as a proxy for gauging the legitimacy of the social licence to operate. This model is tested on a case study from the minerals and energy sector (Base Titanium Mine in Kenya). Our findings show that a company can move up and down on the legitimacy scale, depending on the contact quality with company stakeholders. The interest of providing a social licence heuristic is to make sense of the theoretical controversies surrounding this concept and to offer also realistic guidance to practitioners searching to understand where a firm sits on the legitimacy scale, to enhance transparency and accountability of its social licence to operate and ultimately improve business practice.
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hal-04455602 , version 1 (22-07-2024)

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Marian Eabrasu, Martin Brueckner, Rochelle Spencer. A social licence to operate legitimacy test: Enhancing sustainability through contact quality. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2021, 293, pp.126080. ⟨10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.126080⟩. ⟨hal-04455602⟩
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