Redefining social licence for coral reef protection and management

Coral reefs worldwide are facing existential threats. Initiatives to protect reefs include efforts to reduce local stressors, facilitate sustainable use, and increasingly, apply technological interventions to restore reefs and bolster resilience. Understanding public perceptions of these initiatives is important for securing public support and ‘social licence’. However, our current knowledge of social licence largely reflects industrial resource extraction contexts. Social licence is a potentially useful concept that has not yet been applied to the broad range of existing and novel initiatives to protect coral reefs, which encompass diverse actors and approaches across multiple governance scales. We address this gap, using a survey of 2317 residents of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) region to examine perceptions of three different types of initiatives: regulatory; scientific; and community stewardship. Drawing on social licence predictors from other contexts, and by exploring others relating to GBR values from recent empirical studies, we identify common and unique predictors of support for these three initiative types. Support for all types was influenced by perceptions of threats, such as climate change (r = 0.1710, 0.1366, and −0.1167 respectively for scientific, regulatory and community stewardship initiatives), while some indicators not considered in social licence literature were important for different initiative types (e.g., pride in the GBR was a significant predictor of support for community stewardship initiatives; r = 0.1153). By building an understanding across the three types simultaneously, our study confirms that studying social licence in contexts like the GBR can be useful to reef managers and proponents of initiatives. However, as the factors that underpin support for different initiatives can vary substantially, the search for a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to gaining public support may be misguided.