When it comes to delivering infrastructure projects, establishing trust and goodwill with local communities and stakeholders is paramount.

Cultivating strong relationships with all stakeholders is even more important when large infrastructure projects could potentially strain local resources or affect the environment or communities where people live and work.

The social license to operate is an unwritten contract of trust and ongoing approval between an operator and the local community or other stakeholders, which is being increasingly applied to large infrastructure projects. Although there’s no legal binding to this intangible framework, its importance should not be underestimated. As PATRIZIA, an investment manager in global real assets, puts it: “Ongoing community acceptance and support is hard to define, difficult to get, easy to lose and, if lost, near impossible to get back.”

Indeed, the presence or lack of a social license could mean the difference