ABSTRACT
Social licence, as the term suggests, is about business practice and regulation outside the realm of the legal. It draws on CSR principles103 and is central to Zadek’s third stage of CSR development. Its appearance in the framework is no surprise because it is what is left in the absence of a structure of legal enforcement. It enjoys no particular recognised definition but the most influential analysis of it by Gunningham and his colleagues104
describes it as ‘the demands on and expectations for a business enterprise that emerge from neighbourhoods, environmental groups, community members and other elements of the surrounding civil society’.105 The focus of Gunnigham’s work was on environmental standards in the pulp and paper manufacturing industry and this explains the prominence of environmental interests in the description given. As he acknowledges, within the corporate sector generally there is no agreement about the demands made by those to whom the social licence is presented or how and when their demands should be responded to. This acknowledgment comes against the background of environmental regulation which, while it has its own problems of rigour and enforcement, is more tightly legally defined than the protection required for human rights by the corporate sector. In Gunnigham’s work the idea of a social licence was evidenced in a corporate actor choosing to embark upon a course of behavior that went beyond what was required for legal compliance. In Ruggie’s framework the social licence stands on its own without a close supporting network of legal regulation addressing the immediate problem. The level at which the licence kicks in is the level of protection supplied by existing but diffuse national and international regulation. This puts the importance of the debate referred to in the preceding section about which rights are included in the framework and which are not in context.
