The founder
Chris Hanna founded Social Capital Advisory after sixteen years working at the point where projects either earn the support they need or fail without it. Nine of those years were inside South Australian state government, learning how decisions affecting major projects are actually made and who shapes them. The next seven were spent leading corporate affairs for one of the state's critical energy infrastructure organisations, where engaging landholders, communities, and the agencies along a transmission corridor was the daily work.
That second role is the one that travels. Transmission and energy-infrastructure engagement is the hardest version of the community problem the energy transition is now running into everywhere: long corridors, many landholders, and communities asked to host infrastructure they may see no direct benefit from. The pattern was clear from the inside. Good projects do not fail on merit. They fail on the relationships, the timing, and the quality of the engagement behind them. Social Capital Advisory was founded to close that gap, and to write it down in the form a development approval requires.
Chris authors Social Capital Advisory's thought leadership on community engagement, social licence, and the approvals process for renewables, drawing on first-hand experience rather than templated theory.
Chris Hanna
Director
How SCA works
Social Capital Advisory is a deliberately senior, boutique advisory. Clients get principal-level attention on every engagement, with specialist capability brought in as a project demands, rather than the overhead and hand-offs of a large firm. The work is held to the professional standards a developer's procurement team expects to see.
SCA operates in accordance with the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) Code of Ethics and adheres to all applicable lobbying codes and regulations. We are registered on the South Australian Lobbyist Register and comply with the Australian Government Lobbyist Code of Conduct. We maintain strict standards around truthful representation, conflict-of-interest management, and transparent engagement with government officials and public servants. Our advice is independent, our representations are honest, and our conduct reflects the standards our clients and government stakeholders expect.
Working at the intersection of government and industry means handling sensitive information. Client strategies, government intelligence, and stakeholder information are managed with appropriate security, and never shared across engagements without explicit authorisation. Your information is treated with the same care we would expect for our own. That is the baseline, not the exception.
Where SCA works
We prepare community and stakeholder engagement plans for renewable energy projects across Australia: wind, solar, battery energy storage, and transmission. The practice was built in South Australia's energy transition, which is the proof, not the boundary. South Australia ran ahead of the rest of the National Electricity Market on renewable penetration, which means the engagement problems now arriving in every Renewable Energy Zone arrived here first, and we have already worked through them.
The landholder, corridor, and community questions that decide a project are the same in New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland as they are in South Australia. The approval pathways differ from state to state, and we write each plan to the pathway the project actually follows. The depth comes from South Australia; the delivery is national.