From the book
The Legacy Grievances companion
The five appendices of Legacy Grievances and Historical Claims, rebuilt here as free working documents: the instruments for auditing a site's history, negotiating who carries its obligations, deciding when it can be relinquished, and the plain-language summary written for the community rather than the company.
- 01Download the Community Summary (PDF)
A Summary for Communities
Appendix E, the one part of the book written for the community rather than the company. What a legacy grievance is, why resolution is possible even when the original operator has dissolved, why acknowledgment has to come before compensation, and ten questions to put to whoever owns the site now. It is written in plain language and meant to be copied, translated, or read aloud at a meeting. If you take only one document from this page, take this one, and give it away.
- 02Download the Audit Checklist (PDF)
Historical Audit Completeness Checklist
Phase 1 of the resolution pathway as twenty-one items across five domains: environmental history, the community commitment register, legal and concession history, the occupational health trajectory, and the social and cultural impact record. Each item carries a guidance note. The instruction that matters most is in the preamble: mark an item N/A only where the domain is genuinely irrelevant, never where the information was merely hard to obtain.
- 03Download the Negotiation Checklist (PDF)
Successor Obligation Negotiation Checklist
Phase 3, in fourteen items across three stages: pre-transaction assessment, contract structuring, and post-closing integration. This is the one to take into a deal room. It is the difference between a buyer who has priced the past and a buyer who has simply acquired it, and several of its items exist because the obligation in question cannot be contracted away no matter what the sale agreement says.
- 04Download the Scorecard (PDF)
Relinquishment Readiness Scorecard
Phase 4: seven criteria, each with its threshold and the evidence required, scored Met, Partially Met or Not Met. It exists to stop relinquishment being announced rather than earned. Community validation is one of the seven, which is what separates this from a regulator sign-off sheet.
- 05Download the Charter Template (PDF)
Community Engagement Charter
The Appendix C template for post-operational settings: preamble, five principles of engagement, the operational commitments that make them more than a statement of intent, and the review and signature blocks. Everything you need to complete is marked in blue brackets. Two of the principles are the ones companies most often try to negotiate away, independently funded community advisors and a process-level grievance mechanism separate from the substantive one, so decide about those before you sit down.
- 06Download the Quick Reference (PDF)
Legal Framework Quick Reference
Appendix B: the four frameworks a legacy claim runs into most often, each reduced to what it actually does to historical harm rather than summarised as an instrument. CERCLA and its retroactive, run-with-the-land reach, the CSDDD as it stands after the 2026 Omnibus reform deleted the harmonised civil liability regime, the IFC Performance Standards, and the UN Guiding Principles. Each closes with a practitioner implication.
- 07Download the Glossary (PDF)
Glossary of Terms
The thirty terms the guide uses precisely, from the after-phase and the legacy multiplex to propter rem, perpetual care, relinquishment and transformative reparations. Settlement drafting goes faster when both sides of the table are working from the same definitions, so this one is worth sharing with the other side early.
How to use them
They follow the four-phase pathway in Chapter 8. If a claim has just surfaced, start with the audit checklist, because almost every legacy dispute stalls on a record nobody has assembled. If a transaction is in front of you, go straight to the successor obligation checklist. If you are closing a site, the scorecard tells you whether you are ready to hand it over or only ready to announce that you are.
The community summary is different from the other six. It is not for you, it is for the people on the other side, and handing it over costs a company nothing while telling them a great deal about how the process is going to be run.
All of them are free to use in your own organization and with your own clients. Please keep the attribution. They are working templates, not legal advice: adapt the bracketed provisions with qualified counsel before adoption.
Beyond the book
The book itself carries the frameworks these documents compress, the Mozambique Model in operational detail, and the perpetual care obligations that outlast every party to the agreement. Grievance Mechanisms That Work covers the live channel that would have caught these claims before they became historical, and Social Accord Architecture is the discipline both belong to.