For most of my career, the approval of a major project was understood as a regulatory exercise. Meet the requirements, satisfy the conditions, and the project proceeds. That understanding is now incomplete — and proponents who still operate by it are the ones most likely to be surprised.
The reason is straightforward. Regulatory approval grants the legal right to build. It does not, on its own, grant the practical ability to build. A project can clear every formal hurdle and still stall — delayed by litigation, reopened by political pressure, or stopped by sustained community opposition that no permit anticipated. The missing element has a name that has become unavoidable: social licence.
Social licence is the broad acceptance, among the communities and stakeholders affected by a project, that it should go ahead. It is not granted by any authority and it does not appear on any certificate. It is earned — slowly, through engagement that begins early and treats affected communities as participants rather than obstacles. And it can be lost far faster than it is built.
What I have learned over decades of contested siting files — nuclear plants, transmission lines, quarries, pipelines, large developments — is that opposition is rarely as total as it appears. The voices at a public hearing are real, but they are not the whole community. There is almost always a quieter majority that supports a project, or is open to it, but has no reason to show up and say so. The work of building social licence is, in large part, the work of giving that majority a reason to be heard.
This is not communications in the narrow sense. It is not a campaign that runs alongside the real work of approvals. It is the work. Done well, it begins before the first application is filed, identifies the people whose support or opposition will actually move the file, and builds genuine, two-way relationships with them over time. Done late, or treated as a box to check, it produces exactly the resistance it was meant to prevent.
The projects that get built in this country are increasingly the ones whose proponents understood, early, that approval and acceptance are two different things — and that only one of them can be granted by a regulator. The other has to be earned.