Title: 'Prospecting for a social licence in reef restoration: why and how are SLO models different in industrial and environmental contexts?'
Bio: Dr Justine Lacey (CSIRO) is a social scientist and Director of CSIRO’s Responsible Innovation Future Science Platform. This research program develops new scientific approaches to the social and ethical risks posed by scientific innovation and technology development with a focus on the digital, genetic and environmental scale technologies that are shaping the world around us. She has extensively researched the mining and minerals industry’s ‘social licence to operate’, and how this concept is used in a range of other contexts.
Seminar Summary: Social licence to operate (SLO) is a term that has emerged over the last two decades and is used most widely within the mining and other extractive industries. SLO tends to be used to describe the broad approval or acceptance of a resource development activity that is afforded by local communities or other stakeholders, who can affect the profitability of that activity. For over a decade, CSIRO has undertaken applied research to measure and model SLO in industrial contexts based on extraction of natural resources. The models have routinely identified the social conditions that enable trust and acceptance of those activities. However, in applying these techniques to examine social acceptance of broadscale reef restoration and adaptation in the GBR, our findings are revealing different relationships in the models. This seminar will explore the characteristics of established industrial SLO models and the more emergent environmental management SLO models.
