Agent-based approach to social license durability, An

Abstract

Public expectations for what constitute responsible practices of mining and other extractive companies have been evolving and becoming evermore complex. As focal organizations struggle to come to terms with increased expectation, tools must be developed to assess performance and, if possible, predict and forecast how their performance will be received by stakeholders in the future. The main purpose of this work is to provide a tool for assessing the current state and longevity of public perceptions of corporations who are already measuring their social performance. This tool should allow managers and other decision makers within a focal organization to plan for and manage social risk to their operations by giving them a sense of the potential social outcomes that a specific project may generate. In addition, it may provide insight to others interested in the social license of a given project, such as governments, NGO's, and individual stakeholders and stakeholder groups. The work provided herein is comprised of an agent-based model of fluctuations in social license to operate through the use of opinion diffusion and stakeholder network creation. Agent-based modeling is a bottom-up approach that explores complex macroscopic phenomena through the implementation of simple microscopic rules for the behavior of individual agents. This method allows researchers to explore and quantify potential outcomes. The model created for this work demonstrates the change in social license for a group of stakeholders with a specific distribution of influence and individual consensus levels. Furthermore, it successfully recreates network structures thought to be associated with different levels of durability of the social license granted by a stakeholder network. These network structures are analyzed for their stability and ability to self-propagate within the model.