Walk the Talk—A Sustainability Management System for Social Acceptance in Nordic Mining

Abstract

The mining industry has experienced increased stakeholder pressure over the last decades, and the legitimacy of the mining industry and its place in society is sometimes questioned. On the other hand, high corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance can lead to an increased social acceptance, which in the end may give the mining company the social license to operate. This article focuses on stakeholder management within management system thinking in order to enhance the social acceptance for mining. The purpose is to describe a mining company’s existing stakeholder management practice and identify areas for improvement using established stakeholder management models to achieve an efficient and effective stakeholder management practice. The purpose is also to describe how conceptual sustainability management system (SMS) frameworks can be usefully applied and, more specifically, whether and how stakeholder management models and the concept of materiality analysis are useful for the planning step in an SMS for social acceptance. The findings show that the used SMS framework fits well in this context, and that a materiality analysis can beneficially be used for the ‘systemization of stakeholder demands’ in the planning step of an SMS.