1. INTRODUCTION The global energy transition depends critically on minerals—copper, lithium, and zinc—whose reserves are disproportionately located beneath indigenous territories in the Andes (Owen et al., 2023). Peru alone holds approximately 12% of global copper reserves (USGS, 2023), the majority of which underlie lands where indigenous communities maintain complex multilocality strategies through kinship networks spanning vast territories. The pressure to accelerate access to these deposits creates a paradox: compressing social assessment timelines to expedite production frequently generates precisely the conflicts that halt operations for months or years, destroying value that far exceeds any time savings (Franks, Davis, Brereton, & Vanclay, 2014). This paper draws upon experiences from resettlement processes in Peru, including operations at Las Bambas and Antamina, to examine how conventional resettlement methodologies systematically fail to capture the territorial complexity of Andean populations. We argue that this failure is not incidental but structural: standard tools were designed for sedentary populations with unitary territorial relationships, rendering them inadequate for communities whose livelihood systems are distributed across multiple ecological zones through extended kinship networks. Moreover, the impact-centred approach proves limited when compared to the multidimensional perspective offered by the Sustainable Wellbeing Framework. We propose an integrated methodology that repositions social intelligence as a strategic input for mine design and Life-of-Mine (LOM) planning, rather than a compliance function appended after engineering decisions have been fixed. This reframing—from social risk to strategic value—requires both methodological innovation and a shift in internal governance, including executive-level understanding of resettlement complexities. 2. THE METHODOLOGICAL GAP IN RESETTLEMENT PLANNING Conventional resettlement planning, as codified in the International Finance Corporation's Performance Standard 5 (IFC, 2012), the Land Acquisition and Involuntary Resettlement: Good Practice Handbook (IFC, 2023), and the ICMM Land Acquisition and Resettlement Guide (ICMM, 2015), is grounded in census-based baseline studies. These methodologies identify affected households by mapping residence—where people sleep—and cataloguing visible assets: houses, crops, livestock corrals. Compensation frameworks are then constructed around this inventory. While appropriate for many contexts, this approach contains an implicit assumption that proves limiting in Andean settings: that the census location of a household represents the entirety of its territorial linkage. In the Andean context, indigenous families practise multilocality as a rational territorial strategy. A single family unit may maintain productive activities in three to five geographically distinct locations: high-altitude grasslands for camelid herding, mid-zone plots for potato and grain cultivation, valley agriculture for maize and fruit, access to communal forests for firewood and medicinal plants, and urban life. 66
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