Achieving the social license to operate is a key condition for successfully establishing and running a mining project. The social license requires trust between the different actors, and trust requires knowledge. Based on the supposition that knowledge on complex scientific, technical and socio-economic issues can best be framed and communicated in form of indicators, the paper sets out to describe a practical process of indicator development and testing. The objective was to arrive at a stakeholder-need, rather than expert-judgement driven process for indicator development and for the selection of techniques to support these indicators.

These processes were developed and tested in the framework of the European Commission project EO-Miners. Results from deploying the process at three demonstration sites in the Czech Republic, Kyrgyzstan and South Africa are presented. These experiences provide the basis for discussing the practical constraints such processes face.

The paper describes the necessary qualities of such indicators: those derived by the methodology described (see supplement) confirm to these criteria.