2374 productively with Indigenous communities. Yet the mining industry’s historical relationship with Indigenous groups has been complicated (Coronado & Fallon, 2010), and the consultation models most commonly used have not been designed to build the level of trust that genuine social license and partnership requires (Prno & Slocombe, 2012). Government also plays an increasingly important role not only in the legal and political license to operate (Robinson et al., 2020), but also in facilitating the social license to operate in some jurisdictions (Saenz, 2023). The result is a sector operating in what Bryant & Eagle (2025a) describe as a world of ‘low trust and high tension’, where community conflict has been shown to translate directly into project delays and costly consequences for companies (Franks et al., 2014). Rising demand for critical minerals means this tension is only predicted to continue. Previous papers presented at the World Mining Congress have highlighted the impossibility of a one-size-fits-all approach to consultation and stakeholder engagement in this environment, and the resulting need to combine bold ideas, new approaches and innovation with stakeholder engagement to achieve greater success (Bryant, 2023, Tyrrell & George, 2023). Taking the structural tensions among mining, Indigenous groups, and government into account, this paper presents a governance framework supported by a replicable, tested methodology to move stakeholders from consultation to co-ownership, applied globally with consistent results. 2. THE CONSULTATION DEFICIT: WHY THE STATUS QUO FAILS It is widely accepted that stakeholder engagement operates on a spectrum (Arnstein, 1969), ranging from one-way information to two-way consultation with limited influence, to involvement and collaboration, peaking at co-ownership or partnership. Moving further along this spectrum requires increasing levels of trust between the parties (Walsh et al., 2017) – a trust that may not be present in mining industry interactions. Historically, Indigenous communities have been treated as a final checkpoint in consultation rather than as partners in shaping the plan (Bryant & Eagle, 2025a). A significant consequence of this approach is that communities feel that consultation is ‘done to’ them rather than ‘with’ them, and that they arrive at the point of dialogue with entrenched positions. The government must act as a mediator, and companies bear the ongoing costs of opposition to projects. This is not just theoretical: Lèbre et al. (2024) found that 12% of projects have faced or will face severe costs arising from interactions with the local context. Add to this the normative obligation for companies to recognise international policy around Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), referring to the process whereby Indigenous peoples affected by a planned project have the free choice, based on sufficient and timely information, of whether and how a project occurs, according to their systems of customary decision-making (Tomlinson, 2019). FPIC speaks to Indigenous involvement in development before rather than after the fact, meaning that the status quo of consultation ‘done to’ communities simply cannot remain as it is. Indigenous communities are now rightly seeking governance participation in major projects, and there is progress on this front: in resource-rich jurisdictions like Canada, there are over 500 active agreements between companies and Indigenous communities (Bryant & Eagle, 2025b). Recognition and implementation of FPIC is not as simple as adding a procedural step to a mine’s planning process. FPIC is often framed as a contested political and relational norm about Indigenous selfdetermination and governance (Klein et al., 2023), bringing complex issues into dialogue. It has been established in the literature that dialogue is linked to trust and acceptance between communities and companies (Mercer-Mapstone et al., 2018), both at a conceptual level and applied to communities and projects in Zimbabwe (Gwatidzo & Dumbu, 2025), Central Eastern Europe (Proctor & Maccallum, 2020) and Peru (Garcia-Ortega et al). (Garcia-Ortega et al., 2020). While FPIC is widely recognised in literature as the standard for consent-based engagement (Klein et al., 2023; Owen & Kemp, 2014), the evidence base for how mining companies implement FPIC-aligned dialogue in practice remains limited. The gap is not in aspiration but in process.
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