Emergent Stakeholder Opinion Formation in Multi-Use Geothermal Fields

Abstract

The social license to operate (SLO) is a concept that has been used to understand and measure the feelings of a host community toward the focal organizations in development projects such as the mining and oil and gas sectors for several years. While useful, the SLO is a simple static snapshot of sentiment at a given time and place, whereas in reality, the sentiment of stakeholders is dynamic and complex. It is not merely the opinion of the most influential stakeholders, nor the summation of the opinions of all stakeholders, but an emergent phenomenon that takes into account both the opinion of stakeholders, and the structure of the stakeholder network on which information is distributed. In geothermal development projects, the multi-use flexibility of the resource leads to additional complexity, since there may be multiple industries operating in an area that are using the same resource. In Japan, for example, there is a very strong and culturally-important direct-use community that uses geothermal waters for bathing (onsen or温泉 in Japanese), which may exist alongside small and large-scale power generation projects or other industrial direct-use applications. In these stakeholder communities, it is often difficult to define the focal organization whose SLO is to be measured. In this paper, the authors present the results of a comparative case-study in which the SLO of different types of focal organization were measured in different stakeholder communities. In addition to measuring the SLO, the authors also created an agent-based model (ABM) in order to capture the dynamics of opinion formation and propagation over time and explore policy scenarios through the use of simulation. This model was parameterized and validated using the results of the SLO case study, and the findings are discussed herein.