The Permit and the Permission: A Long Look at Social License to Operate in the Age of Critical Minerals
What social license is, how mining companies earn and lose it, what conflict costs, and how to measure and recover it. A practitioner's guide.
Insights & Analysis
Understanding Extractive Industry Conflicts
Learn frameworks that turn resource disputes into sustainable outcomes. Get insights delivered to your inbox.
Featured
Essential Reading on Extractive Conflict
The Role of Apology and Acknowledgment in Mining Conflict Resolution
Without genuine acknowledgment of harm, no mining-community agreement holds.
From Adversarial to Collaborative: Transforming Mining Conflict Dynamics
When mining conflicts calcify into adversarial stalemates, settlement-focused approaches make things worse, not better.
Infrastructure Projects and Community Mediation: Pipelines, Roads, and Dams
How mediation principles from extractive industries apply to pipelines, roads, and dams, and where infrastructure developers consistently get it wrong.
Community Relations in Mining vs. Oil & Gas: Key Differences That Shape Your Strategy
Why the community relations playbook that works for an offshore gas platform will fail at an open-pit copper mine, and what to do instead.
Critical Minerals and Community Conflict: The New Frontier
The global rush for critical minerals is generating community conflict at a pace and scale the extractive industry has not seen in decades.
Navigating the Space Between: The Invisible Toll of Social Performance Work in Mining
What community relations officers in mining and extractive industries carry, and what to do about it.
Industry Trends: What Is Changing in Community Relations for Mining?
Six Shifts Reshaping How Extractive Companies Engage, Build Trust, and Maintain Social License in 2026.
Social Performance Indicators: Tracking Relationship Quality in Mining Operations
A four-pillar framework for measuring what actually predicts operational stability: community trust, commitment delivery, adaptive capacity, and local development outcomes.
Shuttle Diplomacy in Mining Conflicts: When and How to Use It
A Field-Tested Protocol for Mediators and Community Relations Professionals Navigating High-Tension Extractive Disputes
If community relationships in your project are under pressure, or heading there, let’s talk.
A 30-minute call is enough to understand your situation, whether conflict is already live or you'd rather it never gets there. No obligation, no generalist pitch.
Discuss Your Situation