Mediators and social performance practitioners
Mediating Extractive Conflicts
The practitioner's handbook for mediating company-community disputes in the extractive and energy sectors.
The library
Five books, four sides of the same table
Each volume writes the same discipline for a different reader: the mediator running the process, the practitioner absorbing the pressure, the community negotiating its future, and the board that signs the decision off. Together they are the Social Accord Architecture library.
Community relations and social performance teams
The Human Shock Absorber
The first book to tell the story of the practitioners who absorb the tension so that projects and communities can coexist.
Communities, their leaders and their advisors
When the Mine Arrives
The negotiation guide written for the side of the table that usually arrives without lawyers.
Mediators running extractive disputes
Rebuild Grounds
The two frameworks at the centre of Social Accord Architecture, and the instrument that tells you which one a dispute needs.
Directors and C-suite executives
Social Risk for Boards
How to govern social performance with the rigour a board already applies to safety and capital.
Where to start
Reading paths
Nobody needs all five. Find the line that describes you and start there.
You mediate, or you want to
Start with the handbook for the craft, then take the methodology for the process decision that comes before the first session.
You are the person in the middle
Start with the one about the job itself, because most practitioners read it and realise they are not the only one. Then the handbook for the technique.
You are a community facing a project
This one was written for your side of the table. Read chapter one before the next meeting with the company.
You sit on the board
Two hours, no operational detail. It tells you what to ask management and how to read the answer.
About the series
These five are not five books about five topics. They are one discipline written five times, for the five people who have to act on it: the mediator, the practitioner in the middle, the community at the table, the board that signs it off, and the professional who wants to do this properly.
That discipline is Social Accord Architecture, built over fifteen years of resolving disputes across Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Latin America. Read together the five hold the whole of it. A sixth volume, carrying the name, consolidates them into a single framework and is in production now.
Bulk and institutional orders
For team libraries, university course adoption, or copies for a training cohort, write to me directly and I will arrange it rather than send you back to a retail page.
Lecturers: I send review copies to programmes teaching negotiation, mediation, mining engineering or ESG, and I am usually happy to do a guest session with the cohort.
If the relationship around a project is under pressure, or heading there, let us talk.
A 30-minute call is enough for me to understand the situation and tell you honestly whether I can help. Active opposition, a social licence problem, an FPIC process that needs an independent facilitator, a negotiation a community has to prepare for, or a conflict that is not public yet but will be. It makes no difference which side of the table you are on. No obligation, no generalist pitch.
Every first conversation is confidential.