Analysis for improvement of Social Licensing to Operate (SLO) implementation into infrastructure projects: JICA projects as case studies

Research Project

Project/Area Number	22K18064
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
Allocation Type	Multi-year Fund
Review Section	Basic Section 64060:Environmental policy and social systems-related
Research Institution	Tokyo Institute of Technology
Principal Investigator	Suwanteep Kultip 東京工業大学, 環境・社会理工学院, 助教 (30881776)
Project Period (FY)	2022-04-01 – 2026-03-31
Project Status	Granted (Fiscal Year 2022)
Budget Amount *help	¥4,160,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,200,000、Indirect Cost: ¥960,000) Fiscal Year 2025: ¥520,000 (Direct Cost: ¥400,000、Indirect Cost: ¥120,000) Fiscal Year 2024: ¥1,430,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000、Indirect Cost: ¥330,000) Fiscal Year 2023: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000、Indirect Cost: ¥300,000) Fiscal Year 2022: ¥910,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000、Indirect Cost: ¥210,000)
Keywords	Social conflict / Social License / Social impacts / Social conflicts
Outline of Research at the Start	Social License to Operate (SLO) is a social consideration method in the decision-making process which is a tool to require the approval from local community. This study will develop a new SLO framework combine with key actor network which will be a guidance for project developers for sustainability.
Outline of Annual Research Achievements	The research is now finish the first step of identification of issues and concerns including stakeholders that have impact to the infrastructure project development funded by JICA. The results of these will be presented in the conference. The results information as follows. The study is divided into two parts. Firstly, in-depth literature review which rely on retrospective development project studies are identified and listed up all events caused potential social conflicts. There are two coding analysis steps applied using the NVivo software. Keyword coding to understand the extent to which aspect and dimension were addressed in the reports (100 most frequently mentioned) and analytical coding to identify the key issues and concerns including key stakeholders. The results shown that the most issues and concerns are in EIA processes especially in construction phase. Public participation such as project affected people, compensation and resettlement are the main concerns. Lastly, community and household are the major stakeholders who received the impact and play an importance role of controversial matter. Next step will be interview survey in target countries, Indonesia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The target people will be safeguard staffs of JICA oversea office and implementing agency who work on the project that is selected in this study.
Current Status of Research Progress	Current Status of Research Progress 2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned. Reason All things is under control. So far, all the work is going well following submitted proposal.
Strategy for Future Research Activity	The next step will be interview survey which will conduct to several countries. However, it still not sure that all the target countries especially JICA oversea staffs and local authority will accept for on-site interview survey. if they are not except on-site then online interview will be conducted.