Beyond the Licence: What It Really Means to Belong to a Place

Photo credit: Ben Carles

There is a phrase that has done a lot of heavy lifting in corporate sustainability circles for the past few decades: social licence to operate. It sounds like a commitment. In practice, it has too often functioned as a calculation; the minimum relational investment required to keep operating without disruption. It becomes a defensive posture dressed in the language of responsibility.

We can do better than that. In fact, the moment we are in demands it.

Sustainability Was Always the Wrong North Star

The idea of sustainability first emerged as a risk conversation. Organisations started asking what environmental conditions, regulatory changes, or resource constraints might threaten their ability to continue doing what they had always done. The E in ESG entered the room first, and for a long time it sat there alone, representing a fairly narrow set of questions about physical and regulatory exposure.

Slowly, the S and G joined, giving rise to a field of practice that was still fundamentally fragmented. Environmental performance over here. Social indicators over there. Governance mechanisms holding it loosely together. Each element reported against, managed, and often positioned primarily for external audiences.

The deeper problem is embedded in the word itself. Sustainability by definition is about continuation, holding the course, maintaining the status quo, replacing what you take so that you can keep taking. In the context of business, and its relationship to the world it operates within, this has translated to a concept of separation and balancing the scales to perpetuate the model. Preferably while growing margins.

This is not a vision. It is a transaction with the future.

From Sustaining to Regenerating

More generative thinking has begun to displace this framing and the shift matters more than it might first appear. The move from sustainability to regeneration is not semantic. It represents a fundamentally different question being asked by organisations.

Sustainability asks: what must we replace or offset to continue as before?

Regeneration asks: what does this system need in order to flourish? And how do we flourish with it?

That second question repositions the organisation not as an extractor managing its footprint, but as a participant in a living system — one that has obligations to and benefits from the health of that system. It implies interdependence rather than transaction; that the organisation's own flourishing is downstream of those places and communities it is part of.

This same arc of thinking has tracked through social spaces, though it has taken its own shape there.

Social Licence: The Concept That Told on Itself

Social licence to operate emerged as a way of quantifying the relational conditions under which an organisation could continue its activities without triggering community resistance or disruption. It was a well-intentioned development, acknowledging that commercial activity could not simply ignore the communities it affected (and that ‘negative externalities’ cost real money).

But the framing carried its own limitations. It is the language of permission sought and granted; positioning communities as gatekeepers whose tolerance must be maintained, rather than as participants whose wellbeing is intrinsically bound up with the organisation's own. And when maintenance becomes the goal, it tends to attract the minimum investment necessary. We monitor sentiment, manage perception, and intervene only when disruption appears imminent.

This is still an extractive model where the organisation remains the centre of gravity. The community is a condition to be managed and the system boundary is drawn at the edge of operational risk.

We should be honest about what this model produces: relationships that are transactional, trust that is instrumental, and engagement that evaporates when projects conclude or when the cost-benefit analysis shifts. People in communities (particularly those who have been on the receiving end of this kind of engagement before) can feel the difference between being managed and being genuinely met.

Social Value as a Different Wager

The more contemporary idea of social value creation represents something greater, even if it is still maturing in thinking and practice. Rather than asking what investment is needed to protect the operation, it starts from asking what the organisation can contribute to the conditions that allow a place and its people to thrive. And it does so from the premise that this contribution operates as a feedback loop, with positive and/or negative reinforcement.

This is the move from licence to belonging; from ‘doing to’, to ‘walking with’. It is the recognition that organisations are not independent actors with external impacts to manage, but participants in place — in the social, environmental, and economic ecology of the communities they work within. When those communities are healthy and secure, trust becomes more likely and the conditions for good business improve. When they are depleted, fractured, or suspicious, the costs of operating in them (both human and commercial) tend to rise.

The feedback loops are real, even if they operate on timescales that don't always map to quarterly reporting cycles. Social value at its best, works toward positive feedback loops: investment in community wellbeing generating the kind of trust, capability, and social infrastructure that creates better conditions for everyone operating in that place, including the organisation doing the investing. It is the recognition that we thrive together or we don't thrive at all.

Why This Is Hard, and Why That Doesn't Excuse Doing It Poorly

None of this is easy to operationalise and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Social value is deeply contextual, shaped by the specific history, demographics, relationships, and values of a place and its people. It’s about what matters to them, not what an organisation has decided matters on their behalf. Getting this right requires time and patience at a scale that project timelines and funding cycles are structurally ill-equipped to accommodate.

This creates a real tension that deserves to be named rather than papered over. The appetite for authentic, place-based social value creation is frequently undermined by the very frameworks used to fund and govern it: fixed-term grants, reporting requirements designed for accountability rather than learning, and stakeholder engagement processes that treat genuine relationship building as a budget line rather than a long-term commitment.

Here is the hard truth about good intentions without follow through: entering a community, raising expectations, making promises, then withdrawing when funding ends or priorities shift is often worse than having done nothing. Trust, once broken in this way, tends to harden into scepticism that makes the next organisation's work harder. The people most likely to bear the cost of this are those with the least power to push back.

Starting as You Mean to Go On

If there is a practical centre to all of this, it is about the quality of beginning. Organisations that want to create genuine social value need to think carefully about how they enter a place because this tends to shape everything that follows.

This starts with understanding before acting. The diversity of a place — its communities, its histories, its existing relationships and fault lines — is not background information. It is the substance of the work. Categorising stakeholders into manageable groups for the purposes of a consultation process is understandable as an administrative necessity, but it should be held lightly, as it’s always a reduction of something richer and more particular than they can contain.

Authenticity in relationship building requires continuity. One of the most consistent failures in place-based engagement is the churn of personnel. Community members build relationships with individuals who then move on, leaving those communities to start again with someone new who doesn't know the history. Continuity of people and of attention from decision makers is not a soft consideration. It is a structural prerequisite for trust.

Being willing to ‘not know’ is important too. Organisations that enter communities with all the answers, or that engage primarily as a means of validating or explaining their decisions, tend to produce the kind of consultation theatre that communities have become, understandably, very reluctant to participate in. Holding space for uncertainty is both ethically necessary and practically useful; the community knows things the organisation doesn't and that might change the plan.

And perhaps most critically: if you ask, you must be willing to hear. Engagement that results in no discernible change to decisions is not engagement. It is a process that borrows the form of listening to provide cover for decisions already made. No one likes talking to a wall, and people who have experienced this repeatedly stop talking, or channel that energy elsewhere in ways that are less constructive for everyone.

The burden of engagement must be examined honestly. When organisations design participation processes that require significant time, travel, technological access, or navigational capacity from community members who may have less of all of these than the organisation itself, they are not creating equitable conditions for voice. They are creating conditions that systematically favour the already-advantaged and mistaking participation as evidence of broad community support. This needs to be designed out, not managed around.

The Deeper Wager

What all of this points toward is a reorientation that is more than methodological. It is a shift in how organisations understand their relationship to place: from visitor to participant, from extractor to contributor, from licence-holder to participative community member.

This is not naive. It does not require organisations to abandon commercial imperatives or pretend that their interests are identical to community interests when they are not. What it requires is the honesty to acknowledge the asymmetry of power and the willingness to act in ways that don't simply exploit it. And it requires the patience to build the kind of trust that makes genuine, shared flourishing possible over time.

The phrase social licence to operate will probably be with us for a while yet. But the organisations beginning to do this well have quietly moved past it. They are not asking what they need to do to keep operating. They are asking what kind of presence they want to be in the places that have let them in.

That is a better question. And it tends to produce better answers — for everyone.