10th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference in conjunction with the Australian Social Network Analysis Conference (ASNAC)

A social licence to operate (SLO) refers to the ongoing acceptance of organisations and their activities by communities and the wider public. Moving beyond basic regulatory compliance and evolving into broader social accountability, this concept helps to explain why and how communities come to approve or reject the organisations that affect them. However, applying a framework of social licence used in one industry to another presents a methodological challenge: identifying the common drivers of acceptance while adapting the approach and interpretation to the local, social, and institutional contexts that are unique to each industry and community.

Drawing on a methodology developed in CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, and then advanced and operationalised by Voconiq for the extractive industries, this presentation outlines how social research can be integrated with data science to measure and track SLO across different sectors. The method combines intentional survey design, repeated measurement, reproducible data processing, and theory-driven path modelling. Path analyses examine relationships between trust, acceptance, perceived impacts, fairness, and industry responsiveness (among other factors), while qualitative comments provide an additional lens into community experience. This approach allows for the recurring versus circumstantial predictors of social performance to be systematically explored.

Incorporating close to a decade of longitudinal data, this presentation highlights the Australian egg industry’s community research program as an applied case study. A core set of survey questions has enabled comparison of national attitudes and perceptions of the egg industry over 9 years, using representative adult samples. In 2026, industry responsiveness ranked first among the modelled drivers of trust, while clear labelling was the strongest predictor of industry support when considering the relative costs and benefits of its operation. Findings from this body of work illustrate how a conceptual framework first applied in mining can guide research in other industries to understand the shared and distinct relationships underpinning social performance.

As part of the case study’s discussion, particular attention goes to sampling and recruitment, measurement comparability, longitudinal inference, and interpretation of path models within their broader setting. Overall, we demonstrate how social science theory and computational methods can combine to compare SLO across contexts, distinguishing drivers of community trust and acceptance that are broadly transferable from those that provide unique community insights.