With friends like these... The role of prejudice and situational norms on discriminatory helping behavior

An experiment was conducted to examine the impact of homophobic attitudes and situational norms for helping on discriminatory behavior against a gay male. In a partial replication of Frey and Gaertner (1986), participants were asked to provide help to a confederate portrayed to be either gay or heterosexual who either requested help for himself (ambiguous situational norm) or for whom a third party requested help (unambiguous situational norm). Participants' levels of homophobia were assessed either before or after the main helping task. The results indicated that when norms for helping were ambiguous those participants higher in homophobia discriminated against the gay male, but only on subtle indicators of discrimination. In the unambiguous norm condition, participants higher in homophobia discriminated against the heterosexual male. Those lower in homophobia did not discriminate under either norm condition. The results show that it may be sufficient for those with prejudiced attitudes just to believe that it is not the wrong thing to do for their attitudes to be translated into some form of discriminatory behavior

Foresighting for the Australian minerals industry: findings from the AusIMM survey

The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (The AuslMM), the CSIRO Minerals Down Under (MDU) National Research Flagship in collaboration has conducted a survey of AuslMM members to identify the critical factors they believe will shape the development of the Australian minerals industry over the next 20-30 years. The purpose of this survey, and the larger program of fore sighting work being carried out within CSIRO, has been to foster forward thinking about future technology requirements, capacity constraints and stewardship of environmental and social capital in regional Australia to inform this decade's research and development investment decisions. The technological improvements and innovation were seen as the key means through which the industry would be able to achieve greater cost efficiencies or improved returns in the future. MDU conducted this research to help develop scenarios exploring the future uncertainties of the Australian minerals industry

The Language of Science and Social Licence to Operate

Social licence to operate (SLO) is an informal agreement that infers ongoing acceptance of an industrial or energy project by a local community and the stakeholders affected by it. Negotiation of SLOs centrally implicates language and communication, including scientific language and concepts. We first review the literature about the definition and communicative features of SLOs, and their relation to scientific communication. We describe communication accommodation theory and the ways that it can help understand (un)successful SLO negotiation, and describe examples of texts that show accommodative or nonaccommodative language around SLOs. We summarize some results which help indicate different ways of accommodating communities in the negotiation of SLOs. Finally, we describe a research agenda on communication accommodation and SLOs, in the service of improving their impact on energy, the environment, and the transfer of science

The Language of Science and Social Licence to Operate

Social licence to operate (SLO) is an informal agreement that infers ongoing acceptance of an industrial or energy project by a local community and the stakeholders affected by it. Negotiation of SLOs centrally implicates language and communication, including scientific language and concepts. We first review the literature about the definition and communicative features of SLOs, and their relation to scientific communication. We describe communication accommodation theory and the ways that it can help understand (un)successful SLO negotiation, and describe examples of texts that show accommodative or nonaccommodative language around SLOs. We summarize some results which help indicate different ways of accommodating communities in the negotiation of SLOs. Finally, we describe a research agenda on communication accommodation and SLOs, in the service of improving their impact on energy, the environment, and the transfer of science

Public perceptions of established and emerging mining technologies in Australia

Technology plays a central role in mining activities throughout Australia and is critical to achieving greater economic and environmental sustainability. Our choices about which technologies to develop, adopt and deploy in the landscape reflect one of the most critical interfaces between mining and society. There have been numerous reviews and studies of the social licence of the mining industry, which have examined the way in which public perceptions influence the broad acceptance and approval of mining activities. However, very few studies have examined public perceptions of the technologies and extractive methods used by the mining industry. This paper therefore contributes to expand the scope of this mining-society scholarship by understanding the drivers that shape public perceptions in relation to established and emerging mining technologies. We present findings from a survey of Australian citizens (N = 476) that tested their general awareness of and response to different types of mining technologies and extraction methods that are currently in use. These included comparisons between three broad methods of resource extraction technologies including open cut, underground and in situ leach mining. Hydraulic fracturing, a technology that is used in conjunction with some forms of resource extraction, was also included. In this paper, we examine the relationships between the public's self-rated knowledge of these four mining technologies, their perceptions of the environmental and safety impacts of those technologies, and their level of acceptance of each mining technology using descriptive statistics and path analysis. Our research found that higher levels of overall acceptance were expressed for established technologies such as open cut and underground mining. However, our results also reveal a nuanced role for the type of knowledge that citizens may have about novel and emerging technologies in determining their acceptance of these technologies

The relationship between mining and socio-economic well being in Australia's regions

This paper examines the relationship between quality of life indicators and the gross value of minerals production from Australian regions. We used quality of life indicators, aggregated for 71 local government areas containing mining activities, of household income, housing affordability, access to communication services, educational attainment, life expectancy, and unemployment. We find no evidence of systematic negative associations between quality of life and the gross value of minerals production. Instead, mining activity has a positive impact on incomes, housing affordability, communication access, education and employment across regional and remote Australia. Whilst we do not establish causality between mining activity and quality of life, our analysis prompts a rethink of the resource curse as it applies within a single country. We did not find evidence of a resource curse, at the local government level, in Australia's mining regions. Nevertheless, we note observations by many other researchers of negative social impacts on specific demographic sectors, localities, families of fly-in fly-out mining operations, and individuals. This contrast may be a scale issue, with the regional benefits of mineral wealth masking highly localised inequalities and disadvantage. We suggest that there is a need to better understand these impacts and, more importantly, the types of policy mechanisms government and industry can adopt to mitigate or avoid them.Resource curse Regional development Sustainability Social equity

Meaningful dialogue outcomes contribute to laying a foundation for social licence to operate

Social Licence to Operate (SLO) has become an important part of discourse in the extractive industries. It has been argued that attaining a social licence requires meaningful stakeholder engagement and, more specifically, dialogue. The links between social licence and dialogue have not been the subject of much research in the resource context. To address this gap, we examined empirically the perceptions of stakeholder engagement practitioners involved in the extractives industries regarding the outcomes that can result from dialogue in SLO engagement processes. Dialogue, when meaningful, was seen to potentially result in sixteen outcomes some of which were trust, relationships, perceptions of fairness, social acceptance, shared decision-making, and legitimacy. Many of these outcomes have previously been proposed to be integral to the development of SLO in both the academic and popular literature. This article, then, offers a synthesis of and an empirical foundation for such recommendations, and in doing so can inform the design of engagement strategies. We also offer a conceptual contribution to the social licence literature by proposing that some of these central factors of SLO, and outcomes of dialogue, be reconceptualised to add a layer of depth to our understanding of processes in this context. Finally, this investigation reveals areas that future research and development of practice in SLO stakeholder engagement can address

Conceptualising the role of dialogue in social licence to operate

Social licence to operate (SLO) has become an important part of the natural resource management discourse, particularly in relation to contested arenas. The social accountability constituted by SLO requires engagement and relationship-building efforts, which are increasingly prescribed to include ‘meaningful dialogue’ as central. How such dialogue translates into practice has been subject to little research in the SLO context. To examine explicitly the role of dialogue in strategies to address SLO, we present, using an interdisciplinary lens, a conceptual framework. We characterise two dialogue models relevant to SLO from the literature on dialogue: a learning model and a strategic model. We then analyse how these models arise in five engagement frameworks drawn from academic and grey literature. We assess how these frameworks situate, conceptualise, and seek to operationalise dialogue. This analysis highlights key themes that indicate that dialogue in SLO is predominantly portrayed as a goal-oriented, strategic process – rather than a learning and relationship-building process, though in both models dialogue can have a disruptive role. Conceptual clarity is needed, however, as dialogue sometimes refers to a process, sometimes to an outcome, and sometimes to an aspiration. Clarifying what dialogue is and what it can achieve are needed to guide future research and practice