Challenge the practice is addressing: The Social License to Operate Indicators (MIREU Toolbox, Tool 4.4) is a tool measuring the societal level of Social License to Operate and is developed mainly for companies but can be useful for authorities, too. Companies sometimes struggle with knowing whether their project has actually achieved Social License to Operate within local communities. The tool helps them to: first, identify the level of Social License to Operate and then, to understand the situation more broadly on a community and societal level. For quantifying qualitative features, the project has developed a stakeholder survey and a Social License to Operate score calculation system to interpret the results.
Concrete practice to achieve the expected goal: The tool consists of four steps. The first one is a preliminary checklist, which helps users to understand the current socio-economic stage of a mining project. There is a list of check points which are based on the Social License to Operate pyramid developed in earlier stages of the project. With the check points it possible to measure whether the level of Social License to Operate is on ‘collaboration’, ‘support’ or ‘acceptance’ level or whether there is a lack of Social License to Operate, which is presented in the preliminary checklist as ‘no acceptance’, ‘resistance’ and ‘protests’ levels. Once the stage of a project has been identified on preliminary level, the user can move on to next two phases which are the Community level indicator development and Societal level indicator development. On community level, measurement parameters include stakeholder surveys, economic indexes or other relevant data. The next step is to measure societal Social License to Operate level by examining how the relevant SDGs align with the stage of mining. Finally, a stakeholder survey is conducted to measure quantify the results of previous steps. The final Social License to Operate Score calculation is done on a 5-point scale where 5 is the highest level of acceptance.
Expected impact/goal of the practice: The expected impact is that companies (or authorities) would take the tool and use the Social License to Operate Indicators to define and follow the level of Social License to Operate in their projects.
Who is the target user group of the practice/intervention or implementing the practice/intervention? The Social License to Operate Indicators are developed mainly for companies but can be useful for authorities too.