Today the social business license is an increasingly important asset of mining enterprises, along with government subsoil licenses and other permitting documentation. Being an informal but critically important public consent to the company’s presence and operations, a social license ensures long-term sustainability and investment attractiveness as a condition of access to enterprise development. In the ESG context, a social license reflects the actual quality of business interaction with stakeholders, showing how well the stated approaches to sustainability are supported by trust from local communities, employees, authorities, and other pressure groups. CSR, ESG and SLO/SLTO represent different management logics. CSR focuses on voluntary business initiatives. ESG acts as a framework for assessing sustainability and non-financial risk. A social license represents a level of public acceptance of a company's activities that is shaped not by reporting, but by the actual practice of relationships. Social license management should be based on up-to-date theoretical approaches to the analysis and prediction of social movements. Existing statistical models confirm that social license management requires not one-time communication measures, but systemic work to change the conditions of the social environment. In this regard, the social license should be considered not as an external image factor, but as part of an enterprise's sustainability strategy.