Suchergebnisse

What is the social licence to operate, and what are its ethical risks and promises? This collection explores these questions from a range of perspectives. Since its first key uses in the late 1990s in application to operational risks for extraction industries, the idea of the 'social licence to operate' has proliferated. It has since been applied to myriad industries--including tourism, paper milling, banking, and aquaculture--and even to the work of scientists and government agencies. Yet what is the ethical status of this concept? It is easy to assume that the social licence to operate is a welcome tool to improve the ethics of profit-seeking enterprises, forcing them to genuinely respond to community and stakeholder concerns, or face operational risk if they do not. No doubt the social licence sometimes--perhaps even often--works in this way. Yet there is ethical risk as well as promise in the social licence. For the concept can be weaponised by stakeholders, taking operational legitimacy out of the hands of settled law and democratic institutions, and wedding it to shifting community attitudes. Conversely, the concept can be used as a rhetorical shield by industry, who can insist they possess a social licence even when engaging in fraught ethical practice. These conflicting uses give rise to a separate worry: that the social licence is too ambiguous to function as anything but a meaningless buzzword, a distraction from high ethical standards and strong governance regimes. This Collection interrogates these challenges, exploring in a range of contexts whether and how the social licence's ethical promise can be secured, and its risks mitigated.

In the international context, human rights are rarely secured by the black letter of law, but rather by the soft laws, political policies and moral prescriptions of protection norms. Two key international protection norms are the well-established Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict (PoC) and – recently added in the last decade – the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP). Yet there is substantial confusion about the specific nature of these two norms, their relationship to one another, and their relationship to the human rights that are held to ground and shape each of them. These questions are complex not merely because there are several distinct PoC norms, nor because all these norms differ one from another. The complexity arises because the relevant differences apply to separate dimensions of each norm. In this way it is possible for a norm to be in one sense narrower than another, yet in another sense to be deeper, and in distinct further senses to be both broader and weaker. With such intricacies in mind, this paper develops a five-dimensional rights-based analysis of norms and uses it to differentiate RtoP from three separate PoC norms, and to illustrate the distinct ways each protection norm provides multi-layered rights protection.

Justifications for intellectual property rights are typically made in terms of utility or natural property rights. In this article, I justify limited regimes of copyright and patent grounded in no more than the rights to use our ideas and to contract, conjoined at times with a weak right to hold property in tangibles. I describe the Contracting Situation plausibly arising from vesting rational agents with these rights. I go on to consider whether in order to provide the best protection for the voluntary activities and consensual interactions occurring within the Contracting Situation, it might be appropriate or even necessary to move to institutions qualitatively similar to copyright and patent. I conclude that in at least some circumstances limited regimes of copyright and patent may be defendable solely on the basis of these very basic rights.