Social Risk for Boards: An Executive Handbook on Social Risk Governance (Social Accord Architecture Series)

The board reviews the financials, the capital plan, the safety numbers. Then, forty-five minutes before close, a video of protestors blocking the access road to the flagship mine hits two million views. The directors who approved the expansion six months ago are hearing the community's grievances for the first time.

That gap, between what the boardroom receives and what the ground actually contains, is the problem this handbook exists to close. Social Risk for Boards gives directors and senior executives a way to govern social performance with the same rigor they already apply to safety and capital, without descending into operational detail that belongs to practitioners.

Written by a mediator who has sat on both sides of the table, including years reviewing the polished reports that reach headquarters and the very different reality waiting in the field, this is a strategic guide, not a how-to manual. It is built for the time-constrained executive: a clear, evidence-based read that delivers line of sight without operational noise.

Across eleven chapters and four appendices, it equips the board to see what it is currently missing:

• Understand the new accountability: why the social license to operate became a mission-critical legal and financial dependency, and where personal director liability now begins.
• Learn from collapse: a forensic reading of the Juukan Gorge destruction and the five governance failures that allowed a decades-old relationship to be erased in minutes.
• Map the hard law: the EU CSDDD, the UK Companies Act Section 172, and the Delaware duty of oversight, translated into the liability context directors must actually manage.
• Quantify the intangible: how to price social conflict into valuation and prove to a CFO that community friction is measurable and material.
• Read the right signals: leading versus lagging indicators, a social performance dashboard, and the red flags that reveal latent risk without practitioner expertise.
• Ask better questions: a curated set of strategic inquiries for management, with guidance on how to interpret the answers.
• Govern in practice: board agenda templates, committee structures, an annual governance calendar, and a phased implementation roadmap.
• See over the horizon: the geopolitics of transition minerals, where surging demand meets Indigenous rights and fragile supply chains.

The appendices add a plain-language glossary, legal framework summaries, a resource directory, and sample board reporting templates ready to use.

Who this book is for: board directors, C-suite executives, and the governance, risk, and ESG leads who brief them in mining, energy, and any business exposed to industrial and extractive projects.

This is the executive-tier 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.

About the author: Thomas Gaultier is a mediator and lawyer who has mediated thousands of community claims across Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe, served as a community and social performance officer on a lithium project in Portugal, and trained some of the world's largest mining groups in conflict prevention and resolution. He is admitted to the New York Bar, has an MBA in Mining and Raw Materials, teaches negotiation and mediation at the Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, and is the author of Mediating Extractive Conflicts, The Human Shock Absorber, and When the Mine Arrives.

The greatest risk is not the absence of minerals. It is the absence of trust. No community should be invisible to the board that governs the company operating on its land.