Social licence to operate measurement for ports: a global exploration of current practices: Social licence to operate measurement for ports: a global exploration of current practices

Ports have historically been seen as being closely physically integrated within their host communities. Therefore, a need for mutual understanding and appreciation between ports and local communities has always been desired. Recent experience has shown that ports and their local communities are increasingly facing each other in confrontational settings, leading to the non-implementation of port development projects. Within this context, it is of fundamental importance to improve acceptance and belief amongst the local communities of the sustainable value creation flowing from port activities. This acceptance stemming from local communities towards ports can be defined as the ‘social licence to operate’. However, few theoretical and empirical contributions are found concerning the social licence to operate concept in general and more specifically the measurement of it within a port context. Given its importance within sustainable port development, we bridge the existing knowledge gap relating to the social licence to operate subject in ports. Consequently, an explorative step has been set towards the understanding of practices of social license to operate measurement by ports relating to local communities. We investigated all publicly available information provided on ports’ websites related to local community stakeholders for a number of selected ports around the world. The obtained data was coded and linked to a total of nine topics related to the social license to operate concept. The use of these topics led to a standardized set of results enabling benchmarking within the content analysis. The research unveils that the majority of selected ports prominently identify their local communities as a stakeholder in publicly available documents. In contrast, we find that very little actions are undertaken by the selected ports related to the actual perception measurement of local communities and the use of web-based tools in order to sustain their relationship with local communities. The results suggests that more collaboration between ports and their stakeholders is needed to provide both conceptual and practical solutions towards the issue of social license to operate measurement. Some larger ports from the sample form an exception and inform both the research and policy-makers towards further development of the practice related to social license to operate measurements. Our findings for these ports disclose a strongly integrated strategy related to and directed towards the port’s respective local communities and the measurement of their perception.