Rebuild Grounds
A Mining-Focused Mediation Practitioner’s Methodology
A working method for the room where a mine and a community have stopped trusting each other, written for the mediators, grievance officers, and advisors who have to decide, before anyone sits at the table, which process the dispute in front of them actually needs, and then run it phase by phase.
Most mediation training assumes one process fits every dispute. In mine-community conflict it does not. A quarrel over dust, blasting hours, and a haul road, and a dispute that began when a waste slope failed and people did not come home, look almost the same on an intake form and need almost opposite handling.
Rebuild Grounds is built for the practitioners who carry that judgment call and need a method they can prepare with next week, not a theory. It gives two complete, phase-by-phase frameworks, a scored instrument for choosing between them, and the scripts, checklists, and case examples to run either one in the field.
The practitioners who sit between company and community and need a repeatable, phase-by-phase method, plus a structured way to decide which process a dispute requires before the first session rather than after the wrong one has already done damage.
The officers who run grievance mechanisms and engagement inside an operation, who want field-ready structure for the disputes that reach their desk and a defensible way to handle the ones that carry serious harm.
Those who stand with communities through conflict and need to recognize when a standard bargaining track will heal and when it will wound, and how to protect people who are still processing harm before any negotiation begins.
The CR managers and company negotiators who carry the operation's side at the table and need a shared method with the mediator, not a separate playbook that collides with the process halfway through.
The leaders who commission mediation and answer for social license, who need to know what a credible process looks like and how to tell engineered engagement from improvised firefighting.
Teachers and researchers in mediation, conflict studies, and transitional justice, who will recognize the REBUILD track's roots in trauma-informed and restorative practice and can use the frameworks to teach.
There are texts on mediation theory, manuals on stakeholder engagement, and academic work on transitional justice. There is almost nothing that hands a working practitioner two complete frameworks for mine-community disputes and tells them, dispute by dispute, which one to use.
Rebuild Grounds does. Drawing on more than fifteen years of frontline practice in extractive conflict, it delivers the method and the judgment together: how to read a dispute, how to run a standard facilitation end to end, how to work when serious harm sits in the room, and how to carry the whole thing with ready-made scripts and checklists.
Before you run any process, you have to pick the right one.
The opening part explains why a single method cannot serve both a benefit-sharing disagreement and a dispute shaped by death or displacement, introduces the dual-framework system, and gives you a scored selection instrument, together with the core principles that hold across both tracks.
For disputes where the relationship is intact and both sides can engage, GROUNDS carries the process through seven phases, from Groundwork to Secure
Each phase comes with its guiding question, its key activities, and the test that must be met before the process can advance, so you always know where you are and what has to be true to move on.
When a community is carrying serious harm, bargaining first does damage.
REBUILD moves through its own seven phases, from Ready to Deliver, putting screening, safety, truth-telling, and acknowledgment before any negotiation, with explicit permission to pause built into the method.
Real disputes do not hold still.
This part shows you how to switch tracks mid-process when the room changes under you, works through sample dialogues and scenarios, and lays out the common challenges that derail mediations before they reach agreement, with ways to recover.
The book closes with the apparatus you carry into the field: a framework selection checklist, phase-by-phase checklists, a quick-start guide, ready-to-use sample language and scripts, and a working glossary.
Twenty-five case examples and fifteen figures run throughout, showing the frameworks succeed, fail, and recover.
Two disputes arrive from the same district. One is a quarrel over dust, blasting hours, and a haul road. The other began when a waste slope failed and three people did not come home. Run both through the same process and you will settle the first and deepen the harm of the second.
The most consequential decision in mine-community mediation comes before anyone sits at the table: which process does this dispute need?
In the Introduction and opening chapter, Thomas Gaultier explains why he wrote the guide he needed and could not find, and why the most consequential decision in mine-community mediation is made before anyone sits at the table. He shows why the structured facilitation that settles a benefit-sharing dispute becomes harmful when applied to a community still processing trauma, and why one process cannot serve both.
It gives you a real sense of the book's argument before you commit to the full text.
The dispute is real. But the dispute is not always the wound. Learn to tell the difference, and to mediate each one well.
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