A Social Licence for Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage: How Engineers and Managers Describe Community Relations

Abstract

Although extensive research has been devoted to public perceptions and acceptance of controversial energy innovations, the perspectives of people developing and implementing such technologies are relatively under-examined. Other industries, such as mining, and social researchers have adopted the term "social licence to operate" (SLO) to conceptualise community-industry relationships. Despite its potential applicability to carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) technology, SLO has received very little attention in this context, specifically from an engineering and managerial perspective. The internationally contested nature of CCS highlights the importance of examining how engineers and managers discuss and understand the term SLO. Given the central role of engineers and managers in developing CCS technology and contributing to the creation of the contexts in which people relate to it, knowledge of how they understand their connection to communities impacted by the technology is a key area requiring development. Drawing upon semi-structured interviews with engineers and managers from Australian CCS projects, this research considers their opinions of the relationship between CCS projects and the local or national community, and their understandings of the SLO concept. Results suggest that the emerging energy technology of CCS exposes some of SLO's limitations for conceptualising and analysing the community-industry relationship.

Social Science Insights for the BioCCS Industry

“…It is presumed that the reverse may also hold true; that the public loss of SLO at the project level would also have negative implications for how the industry is perceived more broadly" [94]. There are many perspectives on how best to secure, maintain and measure a SLO, which includes several engagement and communication methods, ideas on the frequency of interactions, perspectives on the fairness of the process, information provision and successful relationship strategies [86,95,96]. The underlying concept across all these approaches is trust [97,98].…”

Social License to Operate and Adaptive Co-Marketing: Exchange, Social Capital and Community-Based Social Marketing

“…Moffat and Zhang suggest that SLO requires four key characteristics to be present, including procedural fairness; distributional fairness; good governance; and trust [33][34][35]. In contrast, Thomson and Boutilier [27] who, expanding on Corvellec's [36] spectrum approach [37], proposed that there were different levels of social licence with boundary criteria between them. The suggested levels are withdrawal, acceptance, approval and psychological identification, while the boundaries were legitimacy, credibility and full trust.…”

“…As an operation developed, legitimacy, followed by credibility on the behalf of local stakeholders would allow acceptance and then the approval of the operation to go ahead [5,9,26]. If a company is seeking to establish a SLO then it must therefore focus on building trust and exercise transparency in order to achieve the highest level of the hierarchy, co-identification [32,[37][38][39].…”

The role of dialogue in social licence to operate in the extractives sector

“…SLO has become an important part of the discourse on resources extraction among academics, community engagement practitioners, and industry executives, with a recent report ranking the need to attain a social licence as third on a list of the top 10 industry challenges (Ernst & Young, 2015; International Council on Mining and Metals, 2015b). The concept has spread internationally (with a particular focus in Australia, Canada, and the United States), being adopted beyond mining by the wind industry (Hall, 2014b), oil and gas industry (Lacey & Lamont, 2013;Richert, Rogers, & Burton, 2015), aquaculture (Leith, Ogier, & Haward, 2014), forestry (de Jong & Humphreys, 2016), bioenergy (Edwards & Lacey, 2014), agriculture (Williams & Martin, 2011), and carbon capture and storage (Dowd & James, 2014).…”

“…The concept has spread internationally beyond its origins in mining and into NRM contexts, being adopted by the wind industry (Hall, 2014b), oil and natural gas development (Lacey & Lamont, 2013;Richert et al, 2015), aquaculture (Leith et al, 2014), forestry (de Jong & Humphreys, 2016), bioenergy (Edwards & Lacey, 2014), agriculture (Williams & Martin, 2011), and carbon capture and storage (Dowd & James, 2014). Definitions vary, but many reflect the notion that SLO is a dynamic level of social acceptance by stakeholders, at multiple levels in society, which may decrease at any stage of the project depending on changes in perceptions and the relationships between a company and its external stakeholders .…”