The hope for creating widespread change in social values has endured among conservation professionals since early calls by Aldo Leopold for a “Land Ethic”. However, there has been little serious attention in conservation to the fields of investigation that address values, how they are formed, and how they change. We introduce a social-ecological systems approach in which values are seen not just as motivational goals that people hold, but they are also deeply embedded in the world around us, in our material culture, collective behaviors, traditions, and social institutions. They are important concepts that define and bind groups, organizations, and societies. Values have emerged to serve an adaptive role and are typically stable across generations. When abrupt change does occur, it is in response to substantial alterations in the social-ecological context. Change builds upon prior value structures and does not result in complete replacement. Given this understanding of values, we conclude that deliberate efforts to orchestrate value shift for conservation are unlikely to be effective. Instead, there is an urgent need for research on values with a multi-level and dynamic view that can inform innovative conservation strategies for working within existing value structures. This paper identifies key questions that will enhance our understanding of the role that values play in shaping conservation challenges and improve our ability to manage the human component of conservation practice.

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This special issue aims to explore a variety of strands of research enquiry into social licence to operate and forestry. Emerging from a successful technical session at the 2014 IUFRO World Congress, we present eight conference and invited papers. These papers are aligned into three themes – theoretical approaches, pragmatic use and governance. The theoretical approaches include a systematic review, social licence and social acceptance, and social licence as a social contract. The pragmatic theme includes an analysis of social licence in the media and two analyses of the social licence and corporate social responsibility nexus. The governance theme encompasses two papers, one exploring public opposition to government policy through a social licence framework and the other social licence from an indigenous perspective.

Changing societal expectations have influenced the way industries involved in the development or extraction of natural resources conduct their operations around the world. Increasingly, communities are demanding more involvement in decision-making around such operations, have expectations of receiving a greater share of the benefits from these operations and require assurances that the industries involved are appropriately regulated. The combination of increasing pressures on industry performance and the associated societal acceptance of such operations has been described as the ‘social licence to operate’. In many ways, the social licence reflects the evolving nature of the relationships between industries and their communities and other stakeholders. Originally used to describe the social acceptability of mining operations, the term has since been applied to explore the broad acceptance that communities and other stakeholders provide to the activities of the forest, agriculture and energy sectors. This article presents a critical review of the emergence of the concept in industry practice over the last two decades. Recent applied research to measure and model the social licence is also examined to demonstrate how the roles of trust, fairness and governance may underpin the development of more sustainable, trust-based relationships between industry and society.

The term, social licence to operate, has been used in the forestry sector since the mid to late 1990s to refer to the broad approval or acceptance that communities, the wider public and other stakeholders afford to industry's management of forest resources. In this context, the social licence has also been described as a form of social contract, which often implies a negotiation that involves government actors. Increasingly, members of society are taking an active interest in how forest resources are used and developed, and seeking to participate in decision-making that has traditionally been the exclusive domain of industry and government. In this paper, we examine this parallel between social licence and social contract with a particular focus on the role of procedural fairness for public and other stakeholders in forest agreement-making, and the role of the state in brokering those agreements. In making this assessment, we provide a critical review of historical documentation relating to the development of Regional Forest Agreements (RFA) in Australia. These agreements were designed to assist multiple layers of government work collaboratively with industry, public and other stakeholders to provide security around forest resources to industry and conservationists, mediate tension in Australian forest management, and preserve the environmental, heritage and social values of the nation's forests. In our review of the documentation relating to the RFA process, we summarise recent research on the processes and failures of social agreement-making that highlight how and why procedural fairness is a critical factor for achieving broad and localised societal acceptance of forest management regimes.

In the past two decades, a growing public interest in environmental and social issues has led to intensified pressures on forest industry companies to gain social license to operate (SLO) by meeting often conflicting stakeholder expectations at both the global and local levels. The integration of social and environmental concerns into business operations vis-à-vis corporate responsibility (CR) practices has become an essential step in obtaining SLO. In the global forest industry, the adoption and development of CR practices within a company is likely to be path-dependent, requiring the incorporation of basic sustainability practices prior to successfully implementing more refined ones. In this exploratory study, we use a leading sustainability rating measure, namely the Kinder, Lydenberg and Domini index, to capture the multi-dimensionality of CR and to empirically study the development paths of corporate social performance (CSP) among large US companies. We then apply trajectory analysis based on mixture modelling, which helps to identify the possible CR leaders and laggards, to identify different groups of US forest companies that follow similar CR developmental trajectories. The use of trajectory analysis also facilitates exploring the shapes of the particular trajectories. According to the results, forest companies in the sample can be classified into four trajectories, all of which show consistent progress in the level of CSP between 1991 and 2009. Based on the differences between groups, we further discuss potential areas, which may contribute to gaining and maintaining corporate SLO.

For forest managers, ‘social licence to operate’ involves implicit acceptance and approval of practices by local communities and stakeholders. Based in social relations of trust rather than formal agreements, social licence overlaps with a psychological concept, ‘social acceptability’, which has been used in examining similar issues with a focus on understanding public perspectives on forest management . This paper draws on social acceptability research conducted in forested landscapes in Australia over the past two decades to explore how social acceptability can inform understanding of social licence. This body of work reveals the diversity of views among publics and local residents, the multiple factors underpinning social acceptability judgements (scenic beauty, trust, beliefs about impacts, normative beliefs, and – most centrally – social values), how social acceptance changes across time, and the complex task of influencing social acceptance. The findings confirm that social licence should be considered as multiple ‘licences’, as acceptance varies among a given group of people, and that establishing social licence depends not only on trust, but on changes in practice to mitigate both short-term and long-term negative consequences of forestry on valued outcomes. The main new insight for social licence from acceptability studies is that variations in social acceptance have a basis in social values. This evidence challenges a common focus on community engagement and impact assessment as strategies for achieving social licence; rather it suggests that forest managers must also consider how their fundamental management objectives align with the mix of values in society. While academic research into social licence is more nuanced, there is a risk that the metaphor of a social ‘licence’ that implies something tangible, enduring and singular may not provide the desired encouragement to managers to develop the deep understanding of public and community perspectives on their activities that is needed to achieve lasting social relationships.

The importance of sustainability information on the social license to operate (SLO) in forestry–sawmilling businesses is on the rise. In addition, the applicability of existing regional and national corporate responsibility (CR) measurement systems for implementing collaborative production chain assessments is low. This study assesses collaboration opportunities for developing common CR reporting for non-industrial private forest (NIPF) landowners and independent small and medium-sized sawmills (i.e. SME sawmills). The material of the study is composed of two datasets gathered from the representatives of NIPF landowners and independent SME sawmill managers in Finland between August and October 2013 by using the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines as a reference. The data analysis employs Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique to evaluate the relative importance of CR indicators for forestry and sawmilling industries. Based on our results, the NIPF landowners and sawmill managers share similar views on CR reporting to a large extent in that both groups mostly value the same economic and social indicators, while at the same time they have seen mostly the same environmental indicators as insignificant. Emphasis on the economic and social issues is a positive sign in the operations of the forestry–sawmilling businesses for promoting the SLO, while for some environmental viewpoints contradictions may exist.

This article analyses the role of media in the representation and circulation of the term ‘social licence’ within public debate. It does so in the context of an increasingly global political economy of forests, growing public interest in resource procurement and environmental sustainability, and new forms of mediatized environmental conflict that carry volatile notions of ‘the affected’. Drawing on a longitudinal study of the three-decade-long conflict over forests and forestry in the Australia's southern island state of Tasmania, this research outlines the emergence, embedding and decline of the term ‘social licence’ in national and local media coverage. The article argues that the term's openness and strategic deployment by stakeholders in news media exposes industries, markets and communities to continuing conflict, while making the term a site for conflict itself. The article concludes by asking how – within the context of expanding international markets and complex supply chains, and sophisticated use of media by campaigners, corporations and governments – ‘social licence’ can be a publicly useful concept.