Social life cycle assessment has matured considerably over the past two decades. Guided by the ISO 14075 standard and the United Nations Environment Programme’s 2020 guidelines, it evaluates social impacts such as human rights, working conditions, cultural heritage and governance across a product’s entire life cycle, from raw material extraction through manufacturing, use and end of life. Stakeholders examined typically include workers, local communities, value chain actors, society at large and children. Yet the method’s DNA comes from environmental life cycle assessment, which was built to trace physical flows and processes. When applied to social questions, this heritage means S-LCA tends to anchor its analysis to the stages where materials physically move, leaving the social drama that surrounds a project, the permit battles, the community anxieties, the historical grievances, largely invisible.

The Finnish team, led by Anni Orola with colleagues Laura Kainiemi, Jarkko Levänen and Ville Uusitalo, turned to controversy mapping to fill that gap. The method is grounded in actor-network theory, a sociological framework developed by Bruno Latour and others that treats both human and non-human entities, from mining companies to protected frog species, as actors capable of shaping socio-technical systems. Controversy mapping, which began as a teaching tool in sociology and has grown into a serious research method, examines and visualizes public disputes by tracing who says what, who aligns with whom, and how arguments evolve over time. The approach proceeds through five stages: moving from statements to debates, from debates to actors, from actors to networks, from networks to broader worldviews, and finally to the politics of how controversies develop across time.

To test the approach, the researchers applied it to Finland’s battery material sector, covering mining, the production of precursor cathode active material, cathode active material and battery cathode production, along with transportation. Finland was a deliberate choice: the country holds reserves of multiple critical battery minerals and is investing heavily in its battery sector, yet despite its comparatively high level of social sustainability, battery material projects there have generated persistent contestation. The team collected data from Finnish-language online news media between November 2023 and July 2024, using Google Alerts with search terms for mining, battery metals and battery chemicals. After excluding unavailable and irrelevant items, they assembled a corpus of 93 articles spanning national and local newspapers, magazines and specialist publications, including interviews, opinion pieces and editorials.

The coding process, carried out iteratively with NVivo software and then organized in Excel, identified 95 actors engaged in the disputes. These ranged from mining and battery manufacturing companies and environmental non-governmental organizations to municipal governments, authorities such as the Finnish Safety and Chemical Agency, residents, landowners, business development companies, researchers and journalists. Notably, the analysis also included non-human actors, among them the Eurasian otter and the moor frog, both strictly protected under the European Union’s Habitats Directive, whose presence shapes the fate of mining projects. Strikingly, none of the 95 actors identified in the Finnish-language media represented the Sami, the indigenous people of northern Finland where several controversial projects are located, a gap the authors attribute to their data sources and a recognized digital bias in the method.

The mapped disputes revealed a rich landscape of arguments. Supporters of the battery industry, mostly companies, emphasized new jobs, economic benefits, risk management plans and the global imperative of the green transition, with some arguing that mining in Finland is more sustainable than in Africa. Opponents, largely NGOs and individual residents writing opinion pieces, pointed to Finland’s history of environmental damage from mining, potential biodiversity loss, sulfate emissions into the Baltic Sea, water contamination, impacts on reindeer herding, fishing, trekking and berry foraging, and what they called green sacrifice zones, where indigenous lands and protected areas are put to industrial use in the name of sustainability. Even battery material trade with Russia became entangled in the debates, with some actors questioning whether such commerce might support aggression against Ukraine, while a company representative defended it as sanction-compliant and even patriotic.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns timing. In conventional S-LCA, social impacts are usually assessed starting with raw material extraction. But the study shows that the socially decisive processes happen years or even decades earlier: area reservations that companies announce to claim prospecting rights, prospecting permits, environmental and water management permits, all of which can provoke community reactions, uncertainty and mental strain long before any mine is built. In the case of the AA Sakatti mining project near the Viiankiaapa wetland, public attention moved from the prospecting permit to on-site activism and finally to a visit by Finland’s environmental minister. Because these pre-production social processes can determine whether a project ever gains social acceptance, the authors argue that excluding them from S-LCA omits some of the most significant social impacts of all.

The case studies also demonstrated why stakeholder categories in S-LCA guidelines should be treated as illustrative rather than exhaustive. In the town of Hamina, home to a planned battery material plant by CNGR Finland, the municipality supported the project while residents, NGOs and a local fishing co-operative opposed it. Around the Suhanko Arctic Platinum project, neighboring municipalities split, with Ranua supporting the mine while Tervola and Simo raised concerns, partly because a wastewater pipe would cross Tervola’s territory without economic compensation and Simo was not invited into the environmental permit process. These procedural fairness issues, the researchers contend, are central to social acceptance, which research links to five drivers: the planning process, impacts on nature and residents, social norms, economic impacts and attitudes toward the energy transition.

On this basis, the study proposes that social acceptance should become a distinct impact subcategory within S-LCA, particularly for assessments involving high land use, such as mining, or emission potential, such as battery chemical manufacturing. The subcategory would focus on measuring the procedural justice experienced by local communities, and could be assessed through media coverage capturing both positive and negative viewpoints, an approach already used by sustainability rating platforms like EcoVadis. The authors note an important limitation: such a subcategory only works in countries with freedom of speech and a free press, though Finland ranks among the top five nations in the world press freedom index. Because the subcategory centers on procedural justice rather than overlapping outcomes, the researchers argue it would not result in double counting with existing S-LCA indicators.

The broader message extends beyond batteries. Industrial ecology has long excelled at quantifying environmental impacts, but the social dimension demands methods that can capture context, history and the plurality of actors, including those, like a protected frog or an unconsulted municipality, that fall outside standard stakeholder lists. Controversy mapping, the authors suggest, could serve as a preliminary data collection step before site-specific assessments, or as a complement to existing S-LCA databases, and could even help identify relevant actors before interviews begin. Future work might integrate additional social science perspectives, from institutional analysis to power relations between stakeholders, and test the approach in countries with different levels of institutional trust and press freedom. As the clean energy transition accelerates the global demand for battery materials, the Finnish study offers a timely reminder that the social license to operate is earned not in the factory, but in the long, contested years before ground is ever broken.

Subject of Research: Complementing social life cycle assessment with controversy mapping to assess social acceptance in the battery material industry

Article Title: Impact in a context: complementing social life cycle assessment with controversy mapping

Article References: Orola, A., Kainiemi, L., Levänen, J., & Uusitalo, V. (2026). Impact in a context: complementing social life cycle assessment with controversy mapping. Journal of Industrial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00153-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00153-6

Keywords: social life cycle assessment, controversy mapping, actor-network theory, battery materials, social acceptance, mining, Finland, industrial ecology, life cycle thinking, procedural justice, stakeholder analysis, green transition