Licença social para operar: estudo de caso em uma pequena central hidrelétrica

Abstract

It's believed Small Hydroelectric Plants (SHP) cause insignificant socio-environmental impacts when compared to large hydroelectric plants. However, it can consider that this fact is false. The installation and operation of these projects can generate conflicts with the population resident in the area. In this context, it's inserted the Social License to Operate (SLO). The SLO is the acceptability of a community towards the operation of a project. This license was born in the mining field, and it's given to a project when it has society's broad and continuous approval to conduct its activities. To get more visibility and to search for fairness in socio-environmental management, this work assumes as general objective: to understand how the relationships between the parties involved (enterprise/entrepreneur, affected community, and other relevant stakeholders) are laying down in the acquisition of SLO in a project of the SHP type. To achieve the proposed objective, we adopted a case study combined with a qualitative and quantitative approach and descriptive and exploratory analysis as a research design. Two kinds of data were collected: through documents available by the entrepreneur and semi-structured interviews applied to stakeholders for the case study. The methodology applied to each of these sets of collected information: for the first, we conduct a critical description out in the light of the literature and, for the second, an adapted content analysis complemented by text mining. There was some conformity of the enterprise's LSO with those present in the literature and noted that SLO is not an abstract concept and becomes a company's strategy aspect. Stakeholders reported that they don't know what LSO is and expect more benefits to the affected region. We observed that the main benefits characteristic of the SLO occurred in the phases preceding the operation of the enterprise. With the completion of the works, the relationship between the parties weakened. As the SLO foresees continuity, participatory systems, collective work, environmental protection, and social guarantee, there is a need to fulfill commitments and meet the expectations presented to promote honest paths to regional development and obtain a higher license level. We expect that this work can bring contributions to the discussion and implementation of new SLOs.