The Social License to Operate (SLO) continues to influence industry, government, and academia on issues of resource development, particularly mining. But it risks becoming a term that includes all types of company activity aimed at gaining public support. To delimit the term, we look at the malleability of the SLO in a highly-regulated context: Sweden. Comparing the academic literature on the SLO at the global level and in the Swedish context, we assess the usefulness of the term across three themes: institutions, corporate-community engagement, and sustainability. Through this review, we argue that the SLO is best understood as a tool and an indicator. A tool to address significant problems and issues and an indicator of deficiencies in the existing institutional framework