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Kendal and Ford (2018) argue that the use of the term social license in conservation needs critical evaluation and highlight the utility of social constructs such as social acceptance in understanding public support for conservation activities. Garnett et al. (2018) argue that social license is a distinct concept, best conceptualized as a binary "emergent property of political interactions before and during the operations of an enterprise." They argue that the license metaphor is a useful one; a social license is a necessary precursor to a regulatory license, and it is something that can be granted and withdrawn. There are aspects of this argument that are worthy of further exploration, particularly the conceptualization of social license as an emergent property of relationships between civil society and conservation actors. However, their expectations that an emergent social license would be binary and recognizable are inconsistent with the vast majority of scholarship on the concept.

“Threatened species programs need a social license to justify public funding” (Zander et al. 2014). Or do they? There is growing acceptance within conservation science that community support for and engagement in ecosystem management programs is likely to lead to better conservation outcomes (Marvier & Wong 2012). However, the language used to characterize relations between conservation and the community is important, and use of the term social license may not always be a useful way to describe this relationship. Since the mid-1990s, the term social license has been widely used in the mining sector to describe implicit acceptance and approval of a mining operation by the community in which it operates (Lacey & Lamont 2014). Other industries such as forestry, aquaculture, and agriculture have begun using the term in a similar way (Edwards & Trafford 2016; Ford & Williams 2016; Moffat et al. 2016). Now social license is beginning to appear in conservation discourse (e.g., Garnett et al., 2015; Oakes et al., 2015). At the same time, the use of social license in other sectors has been criticized (e.g., Owen & Kemp, 2013) because it frames relationships with communities as more singular, binary, and tangible than is feasible or desirable (Parsons & Moffat 2014). The use of social license in conservation needs critical evaluation, particularly given the broad contextual differences between conservation and industries such as mining. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved