Free tools
These come out of the same frameworks I use on mandate. They will not replace an assessment, but they will tell you within ten minutes which part of your process is going to fail first, which is usually enough to start a useful argument internally.
For operators and social performance teams
Score your operational grievance mechanism against the effectiveness criteria in the UN Guiding Principles.
Most mechanisms pass on paper and fail in the village. This walks through accessibility, predictability, transparency, rights compatibility and the rest, and tells you which of them your mechanism would actually survive being tested on.
About 10 minutes
For ESG, legal and compliance leads
Check your due diligence process against what the CSDDD and comparable regimes now expect to see.
Identification, prevention, mitigation, tracking and communication, assessed as an operating process rather than a policy statement. It ends with the gaps a regulator or a lender would find first.
About 12 minutes
For communities and their advisors
Find out how prepared your community is to negotiate with a company that has been preparing for years.
Organisation, mandate, information, advisors, leverage and unity. It is built from the same material as When the Mine Arrives, and it is written to be used before the next meeting rather than after it.
About 10 minutes
Also in Français (opens in a new tab) and Português (opens in a new tab) .
Updated every Monday
A weekly read on where company-community tension is rising across mining and oil and gas, scored by signal strength.
Compiled from public reporting and refreshed every Monday. It is a prompt to look into something, not a finding about a company.
A high score means several independent sources are reporting friction around a project. It does not mean the company has done something wrong, and a low score does not mean nothing is happening. Plenty of serious conflict never reaches the press at all, which is its own kind of signal.
Named entries are reviewed before publication rather than added automatically.
Your progress is saved in your own browser so you can finish later. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you ask for the report by email, and each tool has a control to clear what it has stored.
Privacy and storageStanding in the Middle puts you in one of six roles on the same project and makes you live with the consequences. Free, in English and French.
Play the gameThe Social Risk Quantifier estimates what social conflict is costing a specific project. In development, launching from getsocialaccord.com.
Join the launch listThat is the useful outcome. Send me the score and the two lowest sections, and I will tell you whether it is a design problem, a capability problem, or a dispute that needs handling before anything else can be fixed.
Every first conversation is confidential.
