Can social licence actually be measured?

Yes. Social licence has historically been treated as a soft, unmeasurable feeling, but the signals that make it up are largely public and observable: what people say at council meetings, in planning submissions, in regional media, in inquiry evidence, and in open community forums. Read systematically and against a consistent framework, those signals give an objective, trackable picture of where a project's acceptance sits and which way it is moving.

The key shift is from measuring the nation to measuring the project. National surveys tell you how Australians feel about renewable energy in general. They tell you nothing about how the community around your specific transmission line or battery project feels this month. Social licence is local, and it has to be measured locally.

What social licence measurement looks like in practice

Measuring social licence for a project means three things done continuously rather than once:

  1. Listening across the public record for a named project — the council, planning, media, inquiry and community-forum signals that reveal what the host community and stakeholders are actually saying, rather than what a survey assumes they think.
  2. Scoring those signals against a consistent framework — so a result is comparable over time and between projects, not a one-off impression. Earshot scores against the Condie & Condie (2025) social licence framework.
  3. Tracking the direction of travel — a single reading is a snapshot; the value is in the trend. Sentiment that is improving, holding stable, worth watching, or showing rising risk each calls for a different response, and the earlier that shift is visible, the more room a project team has to act on it.

Why point-in-time reports aren't enough

A social licence report commissioned once, or at approval, captures a moment and then goes stale. Community acceptance moves — around a construction milestone, a media story, a change of ownership, a nearby project's troubles. Earshot is a live dashboard rather than a one-off report, so a project team sees the current state and the trend, not a document that was true the day it was written.