Changing societal expectations have influenced the way industries involved in the development or extraction of natural resources conduct their operations around the world. Increasingly, communities are demanding more involvement in decision-making around such operations, have expectations of receiving a greater share of the benefits from these operations and require assurances that the industries involved are appropriately regulated. The combination of increasing pressures on industry performance and the associated societal acceptance of such operations has been described as the ‘social licence to operate’. In many ways, the social licence reflects the evolving nature of the relationships between industries and their communities and other stakeholders. Originally used to describe the social acceptability of mining operations, the term has since been applied to explore the broad acceptance that communities and other stakeholders provide to the activities of the forest, agriculture and energy sectors. This article presents a critical review of the emergence of the concept in industry practice over the last two decades. Recent applied research to measure and model the social licence is also examined to demonstrate how the roles of trust, fairness and governance may underpin the development of more sustainable, trust-based relationships between industry and society.

Since the mid-1990s, discourse analysis has become an increasingly established framework in environmental policy analysis. The field has diversified in terms of conceptual approaches, methods, topics, and geographies. This special issue revisits trends and traditions regarding theoretical and methodological approaches, ‘old’ and ‘new’ discourses, and our knowledge about discursive effects. We contextualize and discuss the twelve contributions to this special issue against the broader trajectory of the field over the past 25 years. Our analysis reveals an abundance of theoretical approaches with limited cross-fertilization, a plethora of rich case studies but few attempts at meta-analysis, and subtle accounts of discursive effects on discourse, policy and practice without an overarching framework. We suggest seven directions for the field’s future evolution: a need for more comparative and multiple-case studies, theoretical cross-fertilization, pro-active integration of non-English-speaking research contexts, development of methodological capabilities to capture discursive developments across larger numbers of publics and policy arenas, a more explicit conceptualization of agency, power and materiality, a stronger collaboration with transdisciplinary approaches, and a reflexive engagement with the ‘critical’ ambition of discourse analysis.

Understanding how a circular economy (CE) can reduce environmental pressures from economic activities is crucial for policy and practice. Science provides a range of indicators to monitor and assess CE activities. However, common CE activities, such as recycling and eco‐design, are contested in terms of their contribution to environmental sustainability. This article assesses whether and to what extent current approaches to assess CE activities sufficiently capture environmental pressures to monitor progress toward environmental sustainability. Based on a material flow perspective, we show that most indicators do not capture environmental pressures related to the CE activities they address. Many focus on a single CE activity or process, which does not necessarily contribute to increased environmental sustainability overall. Based on these results, we suggest complementing CE management indicators with indicators capturing basic environmental pressures related to the respective CE activity. Given the conceptual linkage between CE activities, resource extraction, and waste flows, we suggest that a resource‐based footprint approach accounting for major environmental inputs and outputs is necessary—while not sufficient—to assess the environmental sustainability of CE activities. As footprint approaches can be used across scales, they could aid the challenging process of developing indicators for monitoring progress toward an environmentally sustainable CE at the European, national, and company levels.