Ethical Funds on “free prior and informed consent”
Last month, Canada’s Ethical Funds published a brief called Winning the Social License to Operate.
The focus is on how companies can reduce the risk of local opposition to their extractives operations by making use of the “latest evolving standards” around what is called free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) of indigenous communities.
As the report points out, local opposition to resource extraction has been running high in many areas of the world. Canadian mining and energy companies in particular have run into recent controversies, including in Guatemala, India, and Canada itself.
