Create Lasting Impact
The project needs a local yes
How do we earn the agreement the project depends on, before it is contested?
How do we earn the agreement the project depends on, before it is contested?
The permit is in hand or nearly. The business case is approved. The project, a plant, a wind farm, a substation, a warehouse, a closure, has a date. And the one thing the plan did not budget for is the people who live next to it: the municipality that has not been asked, the association that has already written to the prefect, the farmer whose access road the works will cut, the employees of the site that closes who are also the residents of the town that loses them. The project team calls it acceptability and has scheduled a public meeting.
Three quarters of wind and solar developers told Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2024 that deeper community engagement results in fewer cancelled projects. The number is known. The practice lags it, because engagement is treated as communication, scheduled after the decision. A community can tell the difference between being informed and being asked.
What the project offers in exchange for the yes and to whom.
A local agreement is a value exchange, and no message replaces one. Which parties can stop the project, which can slow it, which would defend it if they had a reason to. What each of them needs that the project can give: a share of the value, a change to the design, a commitment on jobs or traffic or water, a seat at the table that decides. And what the company is prepared to change in the project itself to earn the agreement, because a consent that costs the project nothing is usually not consent.
The work is Stakeholder & Ecosystem Engagement. It starts with a map, because a project team usually knows its opponents and not its network.
We map the full network around the project: residents, elected officials, associations, suppliers, employees, regulators, industry bodies, the ecosystem the project draws on. For each node, the influence, the dependency, the sentiment and the value the project could create for it. We say where alignment is genuine, where it is performative and where it is absent. We name the nodes where a change would move the rest. For the communications lead this includes the narrative landscape, where the project is understood, where it is misread and where silence is itself a risk.
Then we design the engagement, party by party, as an architecture of exchanges rather than a calendar of meetings: what is offered, what is asked, in which order, with whom at the table. Where a change to the design is more effective than a dialogue, we say so. Where a contract with a supplier or the municipality does more than a consultation, we say that too. And we build the mechanisms that keep the parties in the project after the yes: the committee that decides something real, the indicators the community can check, the channel through which a grievance reaches someone who can act.
What leaves the room is the stakeholder map, the engagement architecture and the co-creation mechanisms, ready to run. The engagement then runs at the pace of the people in it. We stay with the leadership through the first commitments, because the yes is earned in the first promise kept.
In the case that follows we take a decision that looks internal, the closure of a branch. We follow its cost to the people outside the company who end up carrying it: the town, the clients without an alternative, the employees who are also residents. The engagement work starts from that accounting, so that the cost is negotiated before it is imposed.
The branch closure is not an efficiency decision. It is a financial inclusion decision.
ReadMaxime Ferrand, Senior Partner. Sixteen years at Enedis, where each substation and charging point depended on a local agreement before a technical one. He holds the project side: what can be changed in the design, the schedule and the works to earn the yes without losing the case.
Philippe Bourrat, COO & Co-Founder. Twenty-eight years of stakeholder and market intelligence for industrial leaders. He holds the network: who decides, who influences, what each party values and how the exchange is structured so that it holds.
Employees and communities render their verdict through whether they join, stay and consent. A project that has not earned the consent has not yet been approved, whatever the permit says.
Read the judge in Our Approach: SocialThe permit without the agreement, the public meeting already scheduled, the letter to the prefect. Tell us where it binds and we will tell you where to start.