The Licence to Operate

By Ragunauth Ramsaroop Excerpt from “From Teller to Director” 11 min read

Chapter Seven ended with a claim about a floor. Compliance, I wrote, is the floor on which everything else in a regulated operation stands — and it is not, and has never been, the ceiling. This chapter is about what sits above that floor: the right to operate, and what it takes to keep it. A regulator issues a licence once, on paper. The licence to operate is different. It is not issued; it is demonstrated — every day, to the communities around an operation, the institutions that govern it, and the country that hosts it. In Guyana, that right is not assumed. It must be earned, and it can be lost.

The work of earning it has a name, and the name is often misunderstood. ESG — environmental, social, and governance practice — is not a reporting exercise layered on top of operations. It is how a mining company earns and keeps the right to operate. I have spent the last several years working inside that argument, in a role — Liaison Director in the Social Responsibility Department at AGM Inc. — where company operations, government expectations, and community interests meet. This chapter is what that position has taught me about the licence to operate in an emerging market: what it is made of, where it breaks, and why it is the most valuable thing a mining operation can hold.

The right to operate is earned, not assumed

Mining disturbs land, consumes water, and generates emissions. These are facts, not arguments. The question is what you do about them — and the first lesson of the licence to operate is that the legal answer is not the whole answer. A permit from a regulator is a legal fact: it says an operation may proceed within the terms the state has set. The licence to operate is a social fact: it is what communities, institutions, and investors believe about that operation, and belief is not granted once. It is demonstrated, over and over, and it can be withdrawn without any legal document being touched.

In Guyana, that demonstration happens in full view. The institutions through which the country holds the sector accountable — the Environmental Protection Agency and the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission — are more than bodies to satisfy; they are part of the demonstration. And communities are small, connected, and watchful; reputation travels fast. A company that builds trust in one community will be known for it in the next — and the reverse is equally true. There is no corner of the country where an operation can be anonymous, and no phase of an operation — not exploration, not construction, not steady-state production — where the licence can be safely banked. It is renewed daily, in conversations, in commitments, and in the visible difference an operation makes to the people around it.

This is why I have come to treat ESG not as a department's responsibility but as the core of that renewal. The environmental, social, and governance dimensions are not three separate programmes bolted onto a mining business. They are the three ways an operation answers the question the country is quietly asking: what is it like to have this company here?

Stewardship, not just compliance

The environmental dimension is where the compliance mindset does the most damage, because it is the easiest to satisfy and the hardest to see through. Compliance asks: what is the minimum we must do to avoid penalties? Stewardship asks a different question: what would we do if this land, this water, and this ecosystem belonged to our children?

I have watched both questions in operation, and the difference is not cosmetic. The compliance answer produces monitoring systems that generate reports. The stewardship answer produces monitoring systems that generate real data — data someone actually reads and acts on. The compliance answer defers land rehabilitation to the end of a mine's life, because that is when the requirement lands. The stewardship answer rehabilitates progressively, because the alternative is a debt accumulating against the land while the operation runs. The compliance answer discloses incidents when disclosure is unavoidable. The stewardship answer discloses them anyway, because hiding an incident is how a small problem becomes a community's story about you.

None of this makes stewardship a softer standard. It is a harder one, because it commits an operation to things that cannot be checked from a head office and must therefore be verified on the ground — and because it gives up the comfort of doing only what is demanded. Investors and regulators are learning to distinguish between companies that practise ESG and companies that perform it. The distinction shows up exactly where stewardship lives: in the data, in the timing, and in what the company says when something goes wrong.

Communities are relationships, not spreadsheets

The social dimension of the licence is the one people feel first, and it is where the spreadsheet language does the most harm. A mining operation affects people — those who live nearby, those who work on site, those who supply goods and services, and those who lie awake worrying about what is happening to their water and their land. Community engagement fails when it is treated as a checkbox: a consultation held, a register maintained, a number reported. It works when it is treated as a relationship, and relationships have a discipline of their own.

I keep coming back to three practices, because they are the whole discipline in miniature. Early engagement: talk to communities before decisions are final, not after, when the room for their influence is real. Honest communication: explain what you know, what you do not know, and when you will have answers — and resist the temptation to make the answer sound more certain than it is. Visible follow-through: make sure that commitments given in community meetings show up as actions months later — the road that was promised, the training programme that was discussed, the environmental monitoring that was requested.

The third practice is the one communities remember longest, and it is the one most often neglected. A community that has been treated with respect will carry a company's reputation forward; one that has not will carry the opposite. In Guyana, where word travels from one community to the next, that carrying is not abstract — it is the mechanism by which an operation's social licence compounds or decays. Engagement is not a phase of a project. It precedes permits, continues through operations, and is remembered long after.

Governance is the operating system of trust

Governance is the least visible part of ESG and, in my experience, the most important. Without it, environmental and social commitments become optional: good intentions without accountability structures do not survive operational pressure. I wrote in the previous chapter about governance as the architecture of decisions — who is responsible for what, what information informed which decision, and what record is kept. That architecture is also what keeps an ESG commitment alive when the person who made it has moved on, which they always do.

Strong governance means clear policies that are actually followed, not filed. It means board-level oversight of ESG performance, not just financial performance. It means compliance systems that catch problems early, rather than after a regulator does. It means documentation that would withstand external scrutiny, because one day it might have to. And it means that every environmental promise and every social commitment is attached to a named owner, an informed decision, and a record — the same three questions, applied to the licence to operate.

I have seen how governance failures damage the licence: a missed regulatory submission, an undocumented decision, a commitment made without proper authorisation. Each one is small in isolation. Each one tells a community or an institution something about whether the company's word is dependable. That is why I resist the view that governance is bureaucracy. It is the operating system of trust — the layer that determines whether the environmental and social layers actually hold, or quietly dissolve under pressure.

The formal training side of this work matters for the same reason. Certifications in ESG fundamentals and reporting, corporate governance and ethics, and human rights and the environment are not decorations; they are a deliberate investment in the judgement that applies the frameworks — part of the eight certifications I described in the previous chapter. A certificate only means something if it changes how decisions are made. The governance layer is where that change either happens or does not.

Measure ESG in outcomes, not report thickness

There is a standard test applied to ESG in Guyana, and it is the wrong one: the thickness of the sustainability report. Reports are useful. They are not the point. The point is observable outcomes — cleaner water, safer worksites, stronger communities, more capable institutions. Those are the measurements a community can verify with its own eyes, and they are the only ones that survive contact with a sceptical public.

This matters doubly because most ESG frameworks were designed for listed companies in Europe and North America — organisations with mature supply chains, dedicated sustainability teams, and abundant data. The reality of extractives in an emerging market is different. Here, ESG is lived at the level of water and land that touch livelihoods directly. It means coexisting with artisanal and small-scale miners whose practices cannot simply be wished away. It means responding to expectations that a mine provide jobs, roads, health services, and electricity — infrastructure that a European report would not mention. And it means communities that judge performance by what they can see, not by what they read.

None of this lowers the standard. It raises the difficulty. Reporting must be honest about local conditions rather than lifted from a template. Data must be verifiable. Commitments must survive changes in personnel and priorities. An ESG report that could have been written in London without visiting the site is not worth the paper it is printed on — and investors are starting to ask the questions that separate the two. How is community impact measured on the ground? Who verifies the data? What happens when something goes wrong — what is the mechanism, and has it been used? International capital is essential to Guyana's future, and it is won by evidence, not by glossy disclosure.

Responsible mining is not a luxury

There is one objection to all of this that deserves a direct answer, because it is the most common one I hear: that ESG is a developed-world concern, imported into economies with more pressing priorities. I understand the impatience. When a country needs jobs, revenue, and infrastructure, a framework that appears to slow extraction can look like a luxury no one can afford.

I believe the opposite. Responsible mining is not a luxury for wealthy countries. It is the difference between resource extraction that builds lasting value and resource extraction that leaves communities worse off. That difference is the whole argument. An operation that degrades the land, disregards its neighbours, and accounts only to itself does not merely fail a standard — it converts the country's endowment into a liability, and it makes the next responsible operator's work harder by poisoning the well of public trust. A sector with credible operators attracts better capital, better partners, and better talent; a sector without them attracts scrutiny, conflict, and decline.

Guyana is in the middle of one of the most significant mining expansions in the hemisphere, at the same moment its wider economy is being transformed. The economic opportunity is real — jobs, infrastructure, national revenue, supply chain development. So are the expectations. Communities, regulators, investors, and international partners are watching how we extract and how we govern. The choice is not between growth and responsibility; it is between a sector the country can be proud of — one that creates wealth without creating harm, that attracts investment because of its standards rather than despite them — and one that builds on sand. ESG is not the obstacle to that vision. It is the path. The companies and professionals who understand this now will be the ones defining the sector in twenty years.

The social dimension of the licence has one more test, and it is the one Guyana will be asking longest: whether the capability built by the sector belongs to the country when the projects are done. The next chapter is about that test — local content, and why a percentage is not a capability.

Key Points

The right to operate must be demonstrated, not assumed: a regulator's licence is a legal fact; the licence to operate is a social fact, renewed daily in communities, institutions, and the country.
Stewardship beats the compliance mindset: compliance asks for the minimum, stewardship asks what we would do if the land and water belonged to our children — a harder standard, not a softer one.
Communities are relationships, not spreadsheets: early engagement, honest communication, and visible follow-through are the whole discipline in miniature.
Governance holds everything else: the operating system of trust — named owners, informed decisions, records — is what keeps environmental and social commitments from dissolving under pressure.
Measure ESG in outcomes, not report thickness: cleaner water, safer worksites, stronger communities, more capable institutions — verifiable with a community's own eyes.
Responsible mining is not a luxury for wealthy countries: it is the difference between extraction that builds lasting value and extraction that leaves communities worse off.