Advisory
A consultation process that satisfies the regulator and alienates the community is not a success. It is a delayed conflict. A community that arrives at the table without preparation is not being consulted. It is being processed. I work on both problems, and never on both sides of the same one.
For companies and operators
Engagement design gets treated as a document exercise, which is why so many projects have an excellent consultation plan and a community that does not believe a word of it. The work below is about the machinery underneath: what happens to a complaint, who hears it, and what changes as a result.
An assessment of what you are actually doing: consultation history, relationship quality, past conflicts, the grievance mechanism, and the capability of the community relations function. Where appropriate it includes perception research, because how engagement is experienced by the community and how the company believes it is going are usually two different reports.
Interests, influence, relationships, concerns, communication preferences and internal decision-making, for every group that matters. That includes the ones easy to miss: indirect parties, cultural intermediaries, power brokers, and the people whose voices get marginalised inside their own community.
Who you engage, when, about what, through which channel, with what authority, and how the feedback actually changes a decision. This matters most for indigenous consultation and FPIC, where the process has to fit the community’s own way of deciding rather than the project schedule.
Multiple reporting channels, clear timelines, escalation, confidentiality, a non-retaliation guarantee, tracking, and transparent resolution. Then the part most designs skip: making it work across literacy levels, languages, and the power dynamics that stop people complaining in the first place.
Impact and benefit agreements, employment and procurement strategy, training, infrastructure, benefit sharing, and the intergenerational question everyone defers. The work is largely about holding the tension between what a community hopes for and what a project can actually sustain to closure.
Leading indicators rather than incident counts, a social performance dashboard, and reporting that reaches the people who can still change the decision. A board should not first hear about a grievance when it is already a video with two million views.
For communities and their representatives
A mining company arrives with lawyers, engineers, financial analysts and a plan years in the making. The community it negotiates with usually has none of those. That asymmetry decides the outcome before the first meeting takes place, and closing it is ordinary, practical work.
This is not advocacy. I will not tell you what to demand, and I will not speak for you. What I can do is make sure that when you speak, you are doing it from a position you chose deliberately, with the information the other side already has.
What stage the project is really at, what the company needs from you and by when, which approvals it still has to win, and where in that sequence your position is strongest. Most communities negotiate hardest at the moment they have least leverage, because nobody told them the calendar.
The single most common failure I see. A company gets a signature from someone who did not hold the authority to give it, and the agreement dissolves the first time compensation lists go up. We work out who the community actually recognises, how a mandate is given, how it can be withdrawn, and how a decision gets reported back so it holds.
Your interests separated from your opening positions, your walk-away point, what you will and will not trade, and the tactics you should expect from the other side of the table. I have sat on that side, so I can tell you what the company’s team is being told to do.
Reading a draft benefit agreement, a compensation methodology, a resettlement plan or an impact assessment, and translating it into what it will mean in your fields and your households in ten years. Then naming what is missing: monitoring, adjustment, enforcement, and what happens at closure.
Which specialists you need, what to ask them for, what independent advice should cost, and how to keep advisors accountable to the community rather than to whoever is paying them. Knowing what you do not know is most of this.
Monitoring commitments, documenting what was promised, raising a breach without ending the relationship, and adapting an agreement over the decades a mine actually operates. An agreement nobody monitors is a press release.
The community readiness diagnostic scores organisation, mandate, information, advisors, leverage and unity, and tells you which of them will fail you first. It takes about ten minutes and it is free.
Also in French (opens in a new tab) and Portuguese (opens in a new tab) .
When the Mine Arrives is 483 pages of exactly this: how projects work, where your leverage is, how to counter the standard tactics, and how to make commitments stick over the decades a mine operates. It includes template letters and a due diligence checklist you can use directly.
If cost is the obstacle for a community group, write to me.
The boundary
Working with companies and with communities is what makes either piece of advice worth having. It is also the thing most likely to be misread, so I state it plainly and put it in the engagement letter.
On any given project I hold one role. If I am advising a community on its negotiation, I am not the company’s advisor and I am not the mediator in that dispute. If I am mediating, I advise neither party on strategy, because the moment I do, the process loses the only thing that makes it work. If a new mandate would compromise a role I already hold, I turn it down and tell you why.
That restraint costs me work. It is also the reason a community will sit down in a process I have designed, and the reason a company will accept a mediator who has spent months in the villages.
Who this is for
Either you are in planning and want to avoid what you have watched derail other projects, or you are operating and the same community issues keep coming back, which usually means the problem is the system rather than the incident.
The moment for this is a new project, a recurring issue, or a phase transition: construction, expansion, closure.
A project is coming, or it is already there and the terms are being renegotiated. You are being asked to decide things that will outlast everyone in the room, against a team that has been preparing for years. You do not need to be told to be careful. You need to know the sequence, the leverage and the questions.
The moment for this is before the first formal meeting, before you sign anything, or when an existing agreement has stopped being honoured.
You answer to investors and lenders who scrutinise social licence, and you need engagement that is measurable, aligned to your reporting commitments, and defensible when someone asks for evidence rather than intent.
The moment for this is an ESG strategy refresh, a lender review, or an investor question you could not answer with a document.
You support communities through these processes, oversee consultation requirements, or finance a project and need assurance that the engagement meets the IFC Performance Standards and the UN Guiding Principles in practice rather than only in the ESIA.
The moment for this is a capacity-building programme, an appraisal or supervision mission, or a review of an operator’s engagement plan.
A worked example
A major operation in Mozambique had built a full grievance architecture: a fact-finding team, an independent panel, a secretariat, an appeals panel. On paper it was exemplary. In practice it had stopped. Hundreds of claims were backlogged, the bodies inside the mechanism disagreed about evidentiary thresholds, and a processing moratorium had been running for months.
The structure was not the problem. The relationships between the parts of it were. I was brought in as an independent facilitator to run a three-day workshop that put every institutional actor in the same room for the first time, and to get them to agree on the standards they had each been assuming.
The grievance mechanism diagnostic scores an existing mechanism against the effectiveness criteria in the UN Guiding Principles and tells you where it will fail before a community does. It works from either side: run it on your own mechanism, or on the one you are being asked to use.
Takes about ten minutes. No sign-up needed to see your score.
Not on the same dispute, and not at the same time. That is the whole boundary. If I am advising a community on its negotiation, I am on that side of the table for that project and I cannot also be the company’s advisor or the mediator in it. The reverse holds equally.
Across different projects, working both sides is what makes the advice worth anything. I can tell a community what the company’s team is being instructed to do because I have written those instructions. I can tell a company which of its standard moves will destroy trust for a decade because I have watched communities receive them.
Whichever side commissions me, I say plainly at the outset which role I am in, and I put it in writing. If a mandate would compromise a role I already hold, I turn it down and say why.
It is a fair question and I would rather answer it than let it sit unspoken. In practice, community-side advisory is funded in a few ways: by an NGO or development organisation supporting the community, by a foundation or a lender as part of a capacity-building programme, occasionally by the company itself funding genuinely independent advice for the other side, which is standard practice in serious FPIC processes and a good signal when it is offered without strings.
Tell me the situation and I will tell you which of those routes is realistic, and what I can do at what scale. I would rather scope the work to the money that exists than quote for something nobody can fund.
A CSR consultancy will usually produce a plan. I produce a process with tests in it: what has to be true before engagement moves to the next stage, and what happens when it is not true.
The other difference is credibility. I spend as much time with communities as with the client, which is the only reason a community treats a company’s process as anything other than the company talking to itself.
Capability. Training and handover are part of every advisory mandate, on either side, because a system that only works while I am on the account is not a system. For a community that means the negotiating team can run the next round without me. For a company it means the team runs it well six months after I leave.
On the company side: an audit and mapping phase of a few weeks, a design phase run with your team rather than around them, then implementation support and a handover. On the community side it is usually shorter and sharper, built around the actual calendar: preparation before a specific round of talks, then support through it, then a review of what was agreed and how it will be monitored.
Thirty minutes is usually enough for me to see whether this is a design problem, a preparation problem, or a dispute that needs handling before anything else can be fixed. If I am the wrong person, or already committed elsewhere on that project, I will say so on the call.
Every first conversation is confidential.
