--> Obtaining a Social License to Operate: What Can We Learn From the Mining Industry?

International Conference & Exhibition

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Obtaining a Social License to Operate: What Can We Learn From the Mining Industry?

Abstract

In recent years the extractive industry has come to realize that there is great value in effective stakeholder engagement and tremendous risk in ineffective stakeholder engagement. These realizations have led to substantial efforts to address stakeholder relations challenges, especially those essential to obtaining the social license to operate. In the mining industry there are numerous examples of successful and unsuccessful corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies from projects around the world, which can provide a wealth of knowledge to address some of the recent challenges faced by the petroleum industry. In the current age of social media and up to the minute news, a great new play, even in the most remote jurisdiction may never get off with ground without an effective CSR platform. Most corporations in the mining industry have struggled with this fact for some time, due to longer lead times between exploratory drilling and mining/production. As such, they were some of the first to accept, though not always willingly, the new reality of CSR. And although many mining companies have made tremendous progress in recognizing and addressing CSR challenges, many still struggle to develop a CSR platform that adds value rather than simply minimizing loss. Our goal is to accelerate this process in the petroleum industry, to step immediately to value addition, through the application of prudent approaches, effective resource allocations, and applying lessons learned from the mining industry. The presentation will provide examples of successful and unsuccessful applications of CSR in addition to benefits and the consequences produced by each platform. It will address ways mining companies have tackled and produced notable successful outcomes in their efforts to obtain social licenses to operate and the numerous benefits such a license provides to a corporation, while also highlighting some of the differences between these industries and strategies that can be more easily transferred. The presentation will provide an analysis of the difficulties associated with obtaining social license to operate, corrective methods, effective guiding principles, and the lessons learned from case studies. Finally the presentation will illustrate how these lessons can be employed in the petroleum industry, offer practical tools for building and maintaining relationships with stakeholders, and ways which petroleum companies can measure their status within the community.