New release, and the last oneLegacy Grievances and Historical Claims completes the library.Buy on Amazon See the book
Thomas Gaultier in hard hat and high-visibility vest beside a pick-up at a mine site at sunsetThomas Gaultier facilitating a working session with community members and site workers
Pit rims and village halls. Same method, different room.Fig. 1/2

Mediation and social performance

Community mediationfor mining, oil and gas,and energy projects

Companies call me when a social license is coming apart or land access has been stalled for eighteen months. Communities call me when they are being asked to negotiate their future against a team that has been preparing for years. I work in the room where the tension is real and the margin for error is zero.

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2,000+
community claims resolved
15+
years in the field
10
books published
4
working languages

Trusted by and affiliated with

  • Gemfields Group Limited
  • Kagem Mining
  • Unified Patent Court
  • Montepuez Ruby Mining
  • ICFML

Your community strategy is your most expensive blind spot

Resource projects need community support. Communities need a process they can trust.

Cost of community conflictIFC · World Bank data

50–70%

of a project’s net present value

$341Mproject value
>$200Mlost

Research conducted from IFC and World Bank data puts the cost of community conflict at 50 to 70 percent of a project’s net present value. On a project valued at 341 million dollars, that is more than 200 million lost. Not to geology. Not to engineering. To broken relationships.

The company side of the table

  • C.1Delays from unresolved stakeholder conflict cost millions a month.
  • C.2Permits increasingly turn on demonstrable, documented engagement.
  • C.3Social license requires genuine consultation, not a performance of it.
  • C.4Multi-party disputes involve competing interests that are all legitimate.

The community side of the table

  • P.1Power imbalances make meaningful participation difficult.
  • P.2Technical complexity creates deep information asymmetry.
  • P.3Past broken promises produce entirely justified skepticism.
  • P.4People need a process that respects rights and still enables dialogue.

Standard consultation fails because it treats engagement as a compliance exercise. The cost of having no real process is always higher than the cost of building one.

The live instrument

Updated 14 September 2026 · refreshed every Monday

Where company-community tension is rising this week

154
projects tracked
67
at high or severe tension
16
regions

The map is one of four free instruments on this site, built from the same frameworks I use on mandate. Three diagnostics sit next to it, and each one will tell you within ten minutes which part of your process is going to fail first.

Open the full map (opens in a new tab)All the free tools

What the friction is about

  • Environmental & water62
  • FPIC & consent29
  • Protest & blockade15
  • Compensation & benefit-sharing14
  • Land access & resettlement13

Compiled from public reporting. A high count means several sources are reporting friction, not that a company has done something wrong.

C · The method · a walk along the profilePre-feasibility → closure

The method

Social Accord Architecture

The relationship between a project and the people living on top of it is infrastructure. It bears load, it decays without maintenance, and, the part almost nobody acts on, it can be deliberately built. Social Accord Architecture is the discipline I built to do that, and it runs across the whole project lifecycle rather than arriving with the first protest.

It came out of practice, not a seminar. Two thousand grievance claims in Mozambique, land access negotiations on a lithium project in Portugal, and fifteen years of mandates where the relationship between a company and a community decided whether the project moved.

How the method worksThe book is out. Read chapter one

Station 1

Five principles

The constitution of the discipline. Architecture over improvisation, dual accountability, lifecycle integration, trauma awareness, professional distinction. Each one is a scar with a rule attached.

Station 2

Four phases

Diagnostic mapping, blueprinting, assembly, then stewardship across the decades a project runs. Pre-feasibility to closure, not first protest to settlement.

Station 3

Two pathways for when prevention does not hold

GROUNDS for a standard dispute, REBUILD when real harm sits in the room, and a scored instrument to decide which one a dispute needs before anybody sits down. The contingency inside the architecture, not the whole of it.

Core services

Resolve a live dispute, design the engagement that prevents the next one, or build the capability in your own team

01

When the dispute is already live

Community mediation

Impartial facilitation between an operator and the communities around it. Land access, compensation, environmental grievances, benefit agreements, and the disputes that have already reached the road or the courts.

02

Before it becomes a dispute

Advisory

Engagement design for companies: consultation that holds up, grievance mechanisms people use, early warning that reaches decision-makers in time. Negotiation support for communities: the leverage, the mandate, and what the agreement on the table will mean in ten years.

03

When your team carries it

Training

Field-tested mediation and negotiation training for community relations teams, social performance functions, and the mediators who want to specialize in this sector.

Thomas Gaultier standing over a table of participants working through a role-play during a community mediation skills workshop
A community mediation skills workshop, mid role-play. The teaching is never a lecture. People argue a real case badly, then again better.
“Thomas played a crucial role in ensuring agreement was reached during discussions between MRM and community leaders and representatives. Since these discreet engagements, Thomas has been retained by Gemfields on an ongoing basis to provide mediation advice, support and training. Thomas has proven to be a skilled mediator and trainer.”
Gemfields GroupMontepuez Ruby Mining, Mozambique

The library · 10 volumes · on Amazon

Ten books, one method

Each volume writes the same discipline for a different side of the table: the mediator, the practitioner absorbing the pressure, the community negotiating its future, and the board that signs off. The cornerstone volume, Social Accord Architecture, holds the whole method in one book, and the last of them, Legacy Grievances and Historical Claims, takes on the disputes that outlive the operation, the grievance channel and the company that caused them.

All books
Cover of Social Accord Architecture: The Methodology for Building Durable Agreements Between Industrial Projects and Communities
Vol. I · The cornerstone of the library

Social Accord Architecture

The Methodology for Building Durable Agreements Between Industrial Projects and Communities

241 pages16 chapters in 5 parts24 figures, 37 tables

Community opposition is now the most common cause of delay and cancellation for major industrial projects worldwide. The reason is not bad luck or bad people. It is the absence of a discipline.

  • Social performance and community relations leaders
  • Mediators and dispute resolution professionals
  • ESG and sustainability heads, mining and energy executives and directors
  • Investors, lenders and the advocates who hold all of them to account
Buy on Amazon Chapter one, free
Which side of the table are you on?
10 of 10 volumes

The series is complete at ten volumes, from the live agreement through to the harm that outlasts it.

All books

A serious game

The Accord Game

A business game in the sense a business school means it, built for what happens between a project and the people living next to it. Half the room runs a contested lithium project. The other half lives beside it. Both face the same five crises, neither can see the other’s reasoning, and every world ends somewhere different.

You can tell a room that one side holds the money, the information and the clock. Nobody disagrees, and nothing changes on Monday. Hand someone the weaker chair for a morning and it changes.

Up to 56 players
Four worlds, two tables to a world, seven characters to a table. It scales down to one table, and to one person.
Four rooms
Solo online, university and executive cohorts, conference programs, and inside a company.
Explore The Accord Game (opens in a new tab)How it works

A different game

Standing in the Middle

One person, one evening, no facilitator. Its own project, its own cast of six: the community relations manager, the mediator, the community leader, the chief executive, the ESG lawyer and the grievance consultant, all in one shared world. You pick a chair and live with what you decide from it.

It is not a smaller version of the Accord Game. It is the other one, and it is free, in English and French.

Six chairs, one project

  • 01Community relations manager
  • 02Mediator
  • 03Community leader
  • 04Chief executive
  • 05ESG lawyer
  • 06Grievance consultant

Free, about thirty minutes, and your progress saves in your own browser.

Play Standing in the MiddleCompare the two games

From the field

The field teaches what the textbook cannot

All articles
Thomas Gaultier among residents at a village gathering on a wet winter morning in rural Portugal
A village morning in northern Portugal. Most of the useful conversations in that mandate happened standing up, in the rain.

Who does this work

Not a generalist. Not an academic. A field practitioner.

I have mediated more than 2,000 community and historic claims across Sub-Saharan Africa, negotiated land access for a lithium operation in Portugal, and spent fifteen years resolving the conflicts in this industry that generalists cannot reach.

I co-founded the ICFML, the certification body for Portuguese-speaking mediators, and I teach negotiation and mediation at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa. I am admitted to the New York Bar and hold an LL.M. in Alternative Dispute Resolution and an MBA in Mining and Raw Materials. The credentials matter less than the mandates. The work is hands-on, confidential and ongoing.

More about me
“Thomas demonstrates an incredible capacity of active listening and always finds new topics to learn and share; he has a continuous curiosity about the world and a true commitment and care for people that work with him.”
Ana Maria Maia GonçalvesFounder, ICFML
“Thomas is a multi-skilled, energetic and well qualified Dispute Resolution practitioner who is dedicated to building the commitment of Portuguese lawyers to non-adjudicative Dispute Resolution. He is a pioneer in his field and a privilege to work with.”
Rosemary HowellConflict resolution expert, Professorial Fellow

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 license 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.

Request a Consultation Email me directly

Every first conversation is confidential.

The library · 10Shop
Cover of Legacy Grievances and Historical Claims by Thomas Gaultier

New release, and the last one

Legacy Grievances and Historical Claims

The tenth and final volume completes the library. It is the field guide to harm that outlived the operation: transitional justice adapted to corporate disputes, successor liability when the asset changes hands, and the pathway behind more than two thousand resolved claims.

Buy on Amazon See the book