Rebuild Grounds: A Mining-Focused Mediation Practitioner’s Methodology (Social Accord Architecture Series)

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.

In mine-community mediation, the most consequential decision comes before anyone sits at the table: which process does this dispute need? Rebuild Grounds answers that question with a working method, not a theory.

This is the mediation methodology at the heart of Social Accord Architecture: two complete, phase-by-phase frameworks built from more than fifteen years of frontline practice in extractive disputes. GROUNDS carries standard disputes through seven structured phases, from Groundwork to Secure. REBUILD, its trauma-informed counterpart, moves at the pace of harm, with screening, deep safety, and acknowledgment before any bargaining begins. A scored selection instrument tells you which framework the dispute in front of you requires.

Across five parts and twenty-three chapters, it gives you both the method and the judgment to use it:

• Choose the right process: read the dispute, score it against a structured selection instrument, and know when a standard track will heal and when it will wound.
• Run GROUNDS end to end: all seven phases of structured facilitation, each with its guiding question, key activities, and the test that must be met before the process can advance.
• Run REBUILD when harm sits in the room: trauma-informed preparation, truth-telling, acknowledgment, and closure rituals, with permission to pause built in.
• Work from ready-to-use language: sample scripts, checklists, and phase-by-phase tools you can adapt and carry into next week's session.
• Learn from practice: twenty-five case examples showing the frameworks succeed, fail, and recover, plus fifteen figures that map the method at a glance.
• Handle the hard cases: changing course mid-process, and the common challenges that derail mediations before they reach agreement.

The appendices add a framework selection checklist, phase-by-phase checklists, a quick-start guide, ready-to-use sample language and scripts, and a working glossary.

Who this book is for: mediators and conflict-resolution professionals working extractive and community disputes; grievance and social-performance practitioners running processes inside an operation; and the advisors, lawyers, and facilitators who support communities through conflict.

This is the practitioner methodology volume of the Social Accord Architecture reference library, the discipline Thomas Gaultier developed to treat company-community engagement as engineered infrastructure, as rigorously designed and durably maintained as the road, the pit, or the processing plant. It stands alone, and pairs closely with Mediating Extractive Conflicts, the author's reference on mediation craft.

About the author: Thomas Gaultier is a mediator and lawyer who has resolved more than 2,000 community and grievance claims across Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe, served in community and social performance roles on mining projects in Europe and Africa, and trained some of the world's largest mining groups in conflict prevention and resolution. He developed Social Accord Architecture, the discipline that treats company-community engagement as engineered infrastructure. He is the author of Mediating Extractive Conflicts, The Human Shock Absorber, When the Mine Arrives and Social Risk for Boards.

The dispute is real. But the dispute is not always the wound. This book teaches you to tell the difference, and to mediate each one well.