Meaningful Community Engagement in the Extractive Industries

For extractive industry companies, getting stakeholder engagement right is a key element of securing a social licence to operate. Governments also have a responsibility to ensure that communities are adequately consulted before decisions are made on extractive industry developments. While there is a lot of guidance on how to do stakeholder engagement well (mostly targeted at companies), there are still major challenges around actual implementation, and ensuring that public consultation and other forms of community engagement represent a constructive, ongoing dialogue ? between companies, communities and the government ? and that this leads to positive outcomes for local people and broader society.