Communities, their leaders and their advisors
When the Mine Arrives
An Insider's Guide for Communities Negotiating with Extractive Industries
When a mining company arrives, it comes with lawyers, engineers, financial analysts and a plan years in the making. The community it negotiates with usually has none of these things.
That asymmetry decides outcomes before the first meeting takes place. This book exists to close the gap.
I have worked on both sides of that table, including years inside a mining company designing its community engagement strategy. This is the practical guide I wanted to hand to the communities I sat across from.
The appendices add a due diligence checklist, template letters you can adapt, a plain-language glossary, and the twenty things every affected community should know.
Contents
What is inside
- 01
Understand the landscape
How mining projects really work, where your leverage is highest, what the company wants, and what it fears.
- 02
Get organized
Decide who speaks for the community, build a team of allies and advisors, and turn information into power.
- 03
Negotiate well
Prepare properly, recognize and counter the common company tactics, and secure benefit agreements with protections that hold.
- 04
Protect what matters
Win real environmental and health safeguards, and the monitoring needed to enforce them.
- 05
Hold them to it
Enforce commitments, resolve disputes, and adapt agreements across the decades a mine operates.
- 06
Handle the hardest situations
When the government is not on your side, indigenous rights and consent, the gender dimensions of mining impacts, artisanal mining, and when the answer is no.
Who it is for
- Community leaders and members
- The farmer watching surveyors peg out land above the village
- Advisors, organizers, lawyers and NGOs who support affected communities
The opening chapter
Read it before you buy it
Chapter one, in full, as a PDF. Give me an address and it arrives as a link you can open on any device. I send the chapter and nothing else unless you ask for it on the second box.
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.
Every first conversation is confidential.