4. AN INTEGRATED METHODOLOGY: FOUR COMPLEMENTARY LAYERS We propose a methodology organised in four sequential and complementary layers, each producing operational products that directly feed into mine planning and financial decision-making. 4.1 Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Focused on achieving a deeper understanding of the sociocultural context, the first layer deploys ethnographers to comprehend how communities manage their territory and the rationale underlying multilocality. Unlike census enumerators who visit once, ethnographers accompany families through seasonal productive activities—planting, harvesting, herding movements, ceremonial cycles—over a period of three to four months. The product is a comprehensive territorial use map that identifies all locations where the community maintains productive, social, or ceremonial activities, their seasonal temporality, and their relative importance for household subsistence. This assessment does not replace the census but rather calibrates it, revealing what the conventional baseline captures and what it omits. 4.2 Kinship Network Analysis Overlaid on GIS The second layer applies Social Network Analysis techniques to kinship data, constructing matrices of inter-family obligations and resource exchange relationships. When overlaid on Geographic Information Systems, these networks become spatially visible: planners can identify which families are linked by reciprocal labour obligations, which locations serve as critical nodes for multiple families, and which network segments would be severed by the displacement of a specific area. The product is a georeferenced dependency map that engineering teams can use alongside geological and geotechnical data in mine design. 4.3 Early Integration into Mine Design and LOM Planning The third layer introduces social intelligence into the engineering process at the conceptual design stage—before the mine footprint is fixed. When engineers designing pit phases, tailings facilities, and access roads have access to territorial dependency maps, they can evaluate design alternatives not only by cost and ore access but by displacement impact. Previously unaddressable questions become tractable: can the tailings facility be relocated 500 metres to avoid severing a critical water access route serving 20 families? Can the mining sequence be reordered to defer displacement of the most territorially complex community? The financial case is compelling: Franks et al. (2014) documented that production delays caused by social conflict cost approximately US$20 million per week in net present value for large-scale operations. 4.4 The Sustainable Wellbeing Framework for Impact Monitoring The fourth layer incorporates the Sustainable Wellbeing Framework of Smyth and Vanclay (2017) to design holistic monitoring systems that track resettlement impacts across eight dimensions: livelihoods, health, education, housing and infrastructure, social networks and community cohesion, environment, culture and identity, and governance and empowerment. This framework transcends asset-based compensation to address the full spectrum of impacts that 70
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