IAIA18 Conference Proceedings | Environmental Justice in Societies in Transition 38th Annual Conference of the International Association for Impact Assessment 16-19 May 2018 | Durban Intl. Convention Center | Durban | South Africa | www.iaia.org Oil Industry and SLO in the Ecuadorian Amazon: the case of Block 10 Alberto Diantini 1 , Marco Heredia 2 , Eugenio Salvatore Pappalardo 3 , Daniele Codato 3 , Massimo De Marchi 3 1. Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World, University of Padua 2. Department of Life Sciences, Universidad Estatal Amazónica de Puyo 3. Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Padua Abstract The purpose of this research, still ongoing, is to put forward and test a model to measure the concept of Social Licence to Operate (SLO), analysing benefits, limits and possibilities of adopting this tool in the oil context of the Ecuadorian Amazon. The study area is Block 10, an important biodiverse hotspot inhabited by four indigenous groups and owned by Eni Agip Oil Ecuador, an Italian oil company. The study is investigating typical Social Licence factors such as expectations and priorities from local communities and oil companies, particularly in relation to community engagement. The research is adopting a mixed method approach, realizing a survey in the communities of the influence area of the block using also Participatory Mapping tools. A GIS analysis is being performed with the scope of outlining the spatial relationships in which the dynamics of the socio-environmental conflicts and the concept of SLO take place. Introduction Oil industry best practices are increasingly requiring oil companies to adopt measures to minimise harm and maximise benefits to the affected communities. One of such measures is linked with achieving the Social License to Operate (IPIECA et al., 2017). SLO is usually defined as the level of acceptance an enterprise or a project has from the different stakeholders, especially the local communities (Jijelava and Vanclay, 2017). It is an implicit contract which ensures that the social risk of a company is reduced if its behavior is in accordance to the values of the different parts: the higher the SLO, the lower the risk (Prno and Scott Slocombe, 2012). Specifically, the concept of SLO may be seen as a partnership focused on an ongoing, informal relationship between local and distal communities of interest, government and industry, based on mutual trust among the parties (Moffat et al., 2016). Gaining the SLO can be significantly important for those companies whose reputational risk is high, particularly in the extractive industry (Jijelava and Vanclay, 2017). In fact, extensive negative community impacts can determine protest actions (Hanna et al., 2016), damages a company’s reputation, project delays and lost profits, reducing the access to future investment opportunities (Vanclay et al., 2015). On the other hand, a well-recognised key vehicle for achieving a social licence is meeting the community’s expectations (Thomson and Boutilier, 2011) and promoting community engagement (Dare et al., 2014). While SLO has been defined as a potential vehicle to influence corporate-community relations, there has been much debate on the value of the concept (Bice, 2014; Prno, 2013) and its usefulness (Harvey and Bice, 2014; Owen and Kemp, 2013). One of the criticism is that the SLO concept is considered as “an industry response to opposition and a mechanism to ensure the viability of the sector” (Owen and Kemp, 2013: 29). Moreover, in the neo-extractivism era of Latin America contexts, the shared interest between national governments and extractive corporations creates an asymmetric power relation between parties determining apparently formal SLO but without real substance on justice and power relations (Ehrnström-Fuentes and Kröger, 2017). The objectives of this research are 1) develop and test a model to measure the SLO and 2) verify the possibility to adopt the SLO tool in a Latin American oil context. Another added value of this study is