Editorial Note: For the week ending November 30, 2025

From License to Operate to Stakeholder Prosperity: Why Legitimacy Now Defines Value In public debate and media coverage, License to Operate (LTO) is still too often treated as a reactive concept, something that appears only when conflict erupts through protests, blockades, or crises. This narrow framing misses a deeper reality: LTO is not defined by conflict, but by legitimacy. And legitimacy is not static. It is built, sustained, and reinforced over time depending on how projects, institutions, and communities interact. At VERIDICOR, we use legitimacy in a simple and practical sense: the shared perception among communities, institutions, and stakeholders that a project is justified, acceptable, and deserves to continue. Understood this way, LTO is not an event or a checkbox. It is a relational process through which legitimacy is operationalized—via dialogue, expectation management, institutional coordination, and mechanisms designed to prevent future disruption. For VERIDICOR, License to Operate represents the starting line, it determines whether a project can proceed, but not whether it creates enduring value. To capture this distinction, we move beyond LTO toward Stakeholder Prosperity—a framework that asks whether legitimacy is reinforced over time through shared outcomes, not merely maintained through the absence of conflict. The news highlighted this week illustrates this shift clearly. Cooperative arrangements, such as renewed dialogue between Las Bambas and the community of Tuntuma, show how structured engagement strengthens legitimacy through institutionalized relationships. Record levels of formal mining employment in Peru confirm that jobs matter for social acceptance—but also remind us that the employment alone does not guarantee inclusion or durable development. At the same time, enforcement actions against illegal mining in Pataz and renewed debate around REINFO reveal how fragile legitimacy becomes when livelihoods, formalization, and governance lag behind extraction. Similar dynamics are visible beyond Peru. Early-stage engagement around new discoveries in Kenya, regulatory alignment challenges in Zimbabwe, and broader debates across Africa on critical minerals and energy transition all point to the same conclusion: legitimacy is built long before production and sustained only when economic opportunity, expectations, and institutions evolve together. In a global race for critical minerals and energy security, geology attracts attention—but prosperity sustains credibility. What this week’s developments ultimately show is not a series of isolated stories, but a pattern. The future of resource and infrastructure development will be defined less by who can extract, and more by who can translate legitimacy into shared prosperity. Projects and jurisdictions that succeed will be those that move beyond managing acceptance toward building enduring value at the territorial level.