Part three of a three-part series on strategic communication in the resources sector.
Of all the risks a mining company carries, the one with the most brutal economics is also the one least amenable to a quick fix. When a community turns against a project, the meter starts running.
Researchers at The University of Queensland (UQ), the Harvard Kennedy School, and Clark University found that conflict with communities can cost a major project in the order of US$20 million a week in delays, and that they’ve seen flagship developments being abandoned or stalled outright in the face of opposition. Surveys by Goldman Sachs and Citibank cited in the same body of work concluded that more than half of new extractive-sector projects worldwide are at risk of delay, cost overrun, or cancellation because of stakeholder-related issues.
The industry knows this. In EY’s annual survey of mining and metals executives, licence to operate has sat at or near the top of the risk list for years, with 64% of respondents naming community impact as the ESG issue facing the most scrutiny from investors. What is less settled is what to actually do about it, and here, communications strategist Darryl Anderson offers a deceptively simple starting point.
“In some respects, the first part of strategic communication is showing that you’re actually prepared to listen, and to take the trouble to understand,” says Anderson, Chief Executive of Anvil Media. “Communication goes two-ways. It’s not just about how we can say what we need to say in a way that they’ll listen and act on it.”
The greenwashing tightrope
Before a company can talk to a community, it has to decide on appropriate messaging, and the resources sector is acutely aware of the trap of overclaiming. “Greenwashing” has become one of the most loaded words in mining communications, and the instinct it produces is often a defensive crutch: say less, hedge everything, and present a version of the operation calibrated to what the community already expects.
Anderson, who cut his teeth on the same problem in agriculture, thinks that this instinct gets it exactly backwards.
“There’s a tendency to say, ‘We understand what community expectations are, so let’s present a view of our industry that matches them,'” he says. “But that’s surrendering, particularly when those expectations are based on poor information.
“We need to push back and try to re-educate. Not in a combative way, but to reshape the conversation: you expect this, but you actually want that, and here’s what we’re doing that reconciles the two.”
The harder discipline, he argues, is authenticity in the other direction, refusing to manufacture a story the operation can’t back up. “Don’t try to present an inauthentic view,” he says. The point is not to win an argument, but to be straight about a reality that, in mining as in farming, the public is more entangled in than it likes to admit.
“If you say you don’t want major mining projects, then give away your car and your phone and most of the materials in your house,” he says. “There’s really no escaping the need for extractive industries.”
Made well, that case is persuasive. Made defensively, it sounds like spin.
Engaging early, and the box-ticking problem
Anderson’s prescription for community and traditional-owner engagement is to start before positions harden, and to bring affected people into the conversation itself rather than talking at them.
“It’s about engaging early and seeking to get that stakeholder group to be part of the comms solution,” he says.
Anderson is the first to admit that this is far easier said than done. “If there’s already an oppositional, antagonistic framework set up, whether because of action you’ve taken, or just instinctively from the community, then getting people from within that community to actually contribute to your communications is really quite difficult. Being part of the solution essentially means them crossing the trench to work on the other side, and you might find real reluctance to do that.”
Then there is the risk that haunts even the companies doing it sincerely: that genuine relationship-building curdles, into something that looks like a box-ticking exercise.
“It’s a delicate balance, because it can come across as performative,” Anderson concedes. “At least with those in positions of leadership, be upfront. Say: Look, the reality is, if we didn’t think this project was going to proceed, we wouldn’t be here. We both know what we want to do, and we both know we need to ensure we’re doing the right thing by your community in the process.”
Honesty about motive, in his view, is more durable than a polished video that pretends the company has no commercial interest at all.
This is where authentic, story-led content earns its place, done as a genuine collaboration rather than a corporate set piece. Anvil’s work with environmental services firm Niche is an example Anderson points to: a video built around a New South Wales landholder, Ilia Doshen, conserving his property while earning income from biodiversity offset credits. Niche’s founding partner Matthew Richardson described the outcome as “factually robust and beautifully captured,” and said it “exceeded everything we hoped to achieve, for our landholder partners and our business too.” The credibility came from the landholder’s own voice, not the company’s.
When communication isn’t the answer
Perhaps the most useful thing Anderson says on the subject is also the least expected from someone whose business is communication: sometimes communication alone won’t fix the problem, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty.
“If you’re in the Hunter Valley and someone wants to build a great dirty open-cut mine over your back fence, then in a way, no amount of community consultation is going to make you happy that you’ve now got a dusty pit over your fence,” he says. “In the end, there’s often no way to produce that outcome and have everyone be happy. Comms isn’t always the answer.“
The work, then, is in being clear-eyed about what success actually looks like for a given project and a given community, and recognising that it is sometimes a negotiated, imperfect outcome rather than universal goodwill. That honesty, threaded through this series, is the connective tissue of everything Anderson argues. Whether the audience is an investor weighing a capital raise, a frontline worker being trained to stay alive, or a community deciding whether to trust the company at the end of the road, the discipline is the same: understand where your audience actually is, be straight with them, and build the communication around the result you’re trying to reach rather than the content you assumed you needed.
For an industry that prides itself on engineering rigour underground, it may be the rigour it most often skips above ground, and, on the evidence of the projects that never get built, the one that costs the most.
References
- D. Franks et al., Conflict translates environmental and social risk into business costs — community conflict costs of ~US$20m/week for large projects; project delays and cancellations. https://phys.org/news/2014-05-conflict-big-business.html
- EY, Top 10 business risks and opportunities for mining and metals in 2025 / 2026 — licence to operate as a leading risk; 64% cite community impact as the top ESG issue for investor scrutiny. https://www.ey.com/en_gl/insights/mining-metals/risks-opportunities
- Davis & Franks (2011), The costs of conflict with local communities in the extractive industry — Goldman Sachs/Citibank surveys on stakeholder-related project risk. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284423213_The_social_licence_to_operate_A_critical_review
- Anvil Media, Video That Converts — Niche / Biodiversity Stewardship Site (NSW) case study and Matthew Richardson quote.
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