Legacy Grievances and Historical Claims: A Guide to Post-Operational Dispute Resolution (Social Accord Architecture Series)

The mine closes. The company is sold. The grievance channels evaporate. The harm does not.

Long after operations end, the contaminated river, the unbuilt school, and the displacement that was never properly resettled are still there, and there is no longer anyone to bring them to. This is the after-phase gap, and it is where the hardest disputes in the extractive sector now live.

Legacy Grievances and Historical Claims is the field guide that tells the practitioner what to do about it. Written by a mediator who assessed and resolved more than 2,000 historical claims across Mozambique, it is the book the author kept looking for and could not find: not another account of what went wrong at a legacy site, but a tested method for how to respond when standard corporate mechanisms cannot absorb the claim.

Across nine chapters and five appendices, it builds the method from the ground up:

• See the whole problem: why legacy claims are converging now, why investors holding 18 trillion US dollars in assets treat them as material financial risk, and why closure is the longest and most expensive phase of any mine.
• Borrow the right frameworks: transitional justice adapted to the corporate context, truth-seeking, reparations, and guarantees of non-recurrence applied where they have rarely been used before.
• Master the legal architecture: successor liability, obligations that run with the land, ESG-integrated due diligence, and contract design for long-tail exposure in mergers and acquisitions.
• Learn from the field: the Mozambique model in detail, plus what the Tshiamiso Trust, the Giant Mine, and the Colombian recognition of territories as victims reveal, including what did not work.
• Plan for deep time: perpetual care obligations, funding that outlasts the polluter, and stewardship that survives the institutions that created it.
• Run the process: a single four-phase resolution pathway, from historical audit and disclosure through engagement, successor obligations, and relinquishment.

The appendices add a glossary, a legal quick reference, ready-to-use template documents, a case study index, and a plain-language summary written for affected communities. A one-page brief for boards opens the book.

Who this book is for: mediators and dispute resolution professionals, social performance and community relations teams, environmental and corporate counsel, transactional advisors, regulators, and the directors who carry the risk on their balance sheet.

This is the post-operational, legacy branch of the Social Accord Architecture reference library, the discipline Thomas Gaultier developed to manage the company-community relationship across the full life of a project, from the live agreement to the harm that outlasts it.

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, 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.

We do not stumble into reconciliation. We design it.