Here’s a short overview (1 min) of my latest on why we should stop thinking about social license and focus on social capital instead.

Here’s a slightly longer overview (3 mins) of my latest on why we should stop thinking about social license and focus on social capital instead.

Forget Social License, Go for Social Capital

by Dr. Mark Szabo, Vice President, Insights & Engagement, Anstice

Social license isn’t working for anyone anymore. It’s not working for the project proponents because it’s impossible to plan around. It’s not working for opponents either, because it doesn’t get them more integrated into the planning process. We need a new concept to help us organize our thinking, and I suggest we use “social capital” instead. 

The original idea behind social license was solid, but it contained the seeds of its own inevitable irrelevance. The idea behind social capital will accomplish what social license to do, but it is a much more useful approach because it puts the onus on the one proposing something new to make sure they get it right for everyone they're impacting.

The main point of social license was to get across the fact that citizens need to have a say in disruptive public work projects. And by the way, anything new is going to be disruptive, whether it’s to your eventual benefit or not. The disruption is in the newness itself. When government institutions fail to properly engage citizens in a way that gives them a sense of meaningful participation, those citizens are not going to put up with that for very long. In Calgary, for example, the energy sector enjoyed the moral high ground for years. That meant the regulatory function could just ensure that projects hewed to the letter of the law before being approved, and stayed in compliance throughout their lifecycle and thereafter. That’s why the Alberta regulator is one of the best-regarded on the planet. Similar things can be said about the federal regulator.

The regulatory function, however, was never meant to be a public engagement forum, so it left the proponent to handle the engagement around the project. The problem is that most projects had wider policy implications that went beyond the mandate of the regulator. Making things even more challenging, when the proponent has the moral high ground, there is little incentive to authentically engage to begin with. The cracks started showing with Northern Gateway, where some point near the middle of the approval process the unofficial rules suddenly changed. Disaffected citizens found their voice, and had their voice loudly amplified by interested external parties, and the project lost the moral authority to continue.

What does moral authority have to do with a regulatory function? Nothing. And everything. Compliance with the laws of the land is not a matter of opinion or feelings, so the moral high ground should be irrelevant. However, that's assuming that you've got enough social cohesion to continue forward, and that's no longer the case. And it's not coming back any time soon.

The idea of social license was supposed to be a way to give legitimacy to the disaffected or aggrieved citizenry who felt their voice was not authentically part of the planning process. They were, of course, not entirely wrong in their concerns. The energy sector had been famous for treating “engagement” as a way to manipulate compliance after a project was planned, rather than bringing all the necessary voices to the table at the outset in order to design a robust and resilient plan that could withstand the ups and downs of public opinion. More on this later.

The problem with thinking of this problem in terms of social license, however, is that it contains the seed of its own irrelevance. It is based on the idea that citizens have a right to impose their will on others simply by virtue of their own disapproval. The whole point of society is for us to think about how we want to work together, set up the rules to do so, and then try to stick to those rules regardless of how someone might feel about it at any particular time. The problem with social license as a concept is that when you scale it up, your entire society falls apart. Imagine doing this beyond a megaproject. If we granted the loudest (or best-funded) among us the right to run roughshod over the rules we all agreed to, then there’s no basis for society at the most fundamental level.  

A better way to think about this is the idea of social capital because it factors in the importance of civic engagement while putting the onus on those proposing changes to make sure they get it right for everyone they're impacting. If we start with the right concept, the outcome is going to be much more likely to come out right.

Why Social Capital?

Okay, so what is social capital, and what makes it so useful? Putnam (2000, p.19; 1995, p664-5) defines it as “connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them…" "…that enable participants to act more effectively to pursue shared objectives." You can probably already start to see how this is a more constructive way of looking at engagement

According to Mandarano, Meenan and Steins (2010), the current consensus is that there are three aspects to social capital: relationships, trust and social norms. Relationships between people can be indirect when you have common attributes that generate natural affinity, like religion, occupation, interests, etc. They can also be direct between specific individuals. These are all measured by the presence (or lack of) communication. Trust can also be indirect or direct. The former being when one finds others generally trustworthy, and the latter when one finds specific people or groups trustworthy. Social norms are rules that enable groups to function cohesively together, such as codes of conduct, obligation, cooperation, reciprocity, etc. This is very important because if you work to create social capital, you absolutely must understand the social norms, which may vary widely even within a culture. For example, in Canada, Indigenous and non-indigenous groups often end up talking past each other, often because we fail to understand or acknowledge our different social norms and values.

 When relationships, trust and social norms are healthy, you have strong social capital. My earlier research on complex conflicts indicates something very similar. When the patterns of interaction between people become oversimplified, through prejudice or seeing only one perspective, those patterns become malignant, and conflicts become entrenched. That lack of robust, seeing-all-sides-of-the-story interaction creates and perpetuates conflicts. When you mix in the fact that the disagreements are about emotions and values rather than purely rational interests, the conflicts become complex and unstable. If you can reintroduce healthy patterns of interaction, you have a better chance of influencing the conflict to create rather than destroy. Social capital is one way of thinking about the extent to which you've been able to accomplish that. 

 Let’s follow that thread with Mandarano, Meenan and Steins (2010, p.124-5) on the impact of social capital: “Social capital is an important outcome of collective action as well as a precursor to its success. Researchers have shown that social capital can facilitate information sharing to arrive at mutual understanding leading to conflict resolution, more effective decision making, more efficient coordination, and increase capacity to respond to future challenges.” In other words, it’s a self-sustaining model that creates new relationships, more trust, effective collective action, more social and individual benefits, better civic engagement. All of which improves relationships.

 The power of using this concept, in contrast with social license, lies in the fact that it puts the onus on the disruptor to create that virtuous cycle. More importantly, it gives the disruptor agency to actually accomplish what they seek to do because it’s within their control. A proponent can never hope to create social license because it's not something they can grant; it comes from some vague external source that can change at any moment. A proponent can use social capital as a framework for action because it’s something they can actively work towards, not just hope for.

The Ladder of Engagement

 The important learning for the energy sector is that we have to do engagement better if we’re going to create social capital. Mandarano, Meenan and Steins (2010) tell us that before the 1960s, planning was mostly seen as a technical analysis to be undertaken by experts who knew better than anyone else. This, when combined with rational planning theories, meant that civic engagement was limited, because the Powers That Be knew better than the average citizen.

 Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of citizen participation is helpful at this point. She describes stages along the continuum of engagement: Manipulation, therapy, informing, consultation, placation, partnership, delegated power, citizen control. The first few are what Arnstein calls empty rituals, and the latter serve to give people the power to affect the outcome. Which do you think is going to be more effective at generating social capital? 

Sure enough, Roberts (2004, p.320) shows us that the empowering end of the citizen participation ladder does indeed lead to social capital. Roberts refers to the idea of direct citizen participation as “the process when members of society (those not holding office or administrative positions in government) share power with public officials in making substantive decisions and in taking action related to the community.” Roberts goes on to explain how that helps reinforce the relationships, trust and social norms you’d expect to see in high social capital situations.

Care to take a guess which end of the spectrum the energy sector has been operating on? How would you react if your life was being disrupted and you felt like you were being manipulated, coddled, or at best merely informed? Is it any wonder that we’ve been historically pretty bad at generating social capital?

This brings up one last important point for the energy sector. Engagement doesn't have to be all-or-nothing; it can be somewhere along the continuum. Just because we don't want to be at the manipulative end doesn’t mean we have to open the boardrooms and planning sessions to everyone who walks in off the street. There are ways to do effective engagement early in the process to make sure it’s done in a way to build social capital without giving away all control.

We haven't been great at nuance, but at least if we have the right framework, we can stand a fighting chance of getting it right. Social capital is a great starting point.

Dr. Mark Szabo is Director, Insights & Engagement at Anstice, in Calgary. He can be reached at mszabo@anstice.ca and mark@markszabo.com.

References

Arnstein, Sherry. 1996. A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Planning Association 35:216-24 

Mandarano, Lynn, Meenar, Mahbubur, and Steins, Christopher, 2010. Building social capital in the digital age of civic engagement. Journal of Planning Literature 25:123-35 

 Putnam, Robert, 1995. Tuning in tuning out: The strange disappearance of social capital in America. Political Science and Politics 28:664-83

 Putnam, Robert, 2000. Bowling Alone. The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster

Roberts, Nancy. 2004. Public deliberation in an age of direct citizen participation. American Review of Public Administration 34:325-53