Alternative stakeholder dispute resolution for the resources, energy (including renewables) and infrastructure sectors.
We work in the moment when the legal team says "we'll fight this" and a director quietly calculates what another eighteen months of delay actually costs.
A mining or energy project delayed by community opposition can cost between two and four million dollars per month in carrying costs, lost revenue and capital servicing — before a lawyer sends a single letter. Litigation then adds millions more, takes years, generates headlines, and permanently poisons the relationship with the community whose goodwill you'll need for the next project too.
Companies win in court and lose on the ground. They get the judgement and lose the social licence. Then they wonder why the next approval process is even harder.
Social Licence Resolution is the alternative — and the category we built this practice to define.
I'm Nick van der Hoven — a commercial mediator, former CEO of a public mining company, and admitted lawyer in NSW, Australia and South Africa. I've spent twenty years inside the resources, energy (including renewables) and infrastructure sectors — not advising from the outside, but leading organisations through the exact conflicts I now help resolve.
What I do is specific. I work with resources, energy (including renewables) and infrastructure companies facing stakeholder disputes — with landholders, Indigenous communities, climate groups, or local organisations — where the conventional legal approach would win the argument and lose the project.
I hold Australian National Mediation Accreditation, am a Professional Member of the Resolution Institute, and have completed formal training in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural competence. I also hold an advanced certification in negotiation grounded in the Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation — the methodology of principled negotiation set out in Fisher and Ury's Getting to Yes. I mention these not as credentials but as an explanation for why I can sit in a room with an Indigenous elder and a public company board member and be taken seriously by both.
A six-stage method, built on principled negotiation. Equipoise sits between the parties — facilitating, never representing — and helps both sides move toward an agreement they can own.
The work begins on the community side. Before any commercial term is on the table, we earn the trust that resolution requires.
We bring both parties into a shared room — physical or virtual — under explicit ground rules that neutralise the adversarial frame.
Positions become interests. Interests become options. The argument that was unwinnable becomes a problem with shared parameters.
Principled negotiation, anchored in objective criteria. Every option is tested against what would happen in court — and what comes after.
Agreements drafted to bind, to last, and to survive the staff turnover that defines most projects' relationship histories.
Six-month and twelve-month touchpoints. Agreements decay. Renewal is part of the engagement, not an upsell.
Equipoise & Co works in the four dispute categories where conventional legal approaches most often win the argument and lose the project.
Impasse resolutions for private landholder access for resources, energy (including renewables) and infrastructure operations — and the compensation that goes with it. Before access becomes litigation.
Convening and resolving negotiations between resources, energy (including renewables) and infrastructure companies and Native Title parties. Built on cultural competence, not legalese.
Overlapping tenure and operational conflict where two energy projects compete for the same ground. We resolve who builds what, where, and on what terms.
Brokering agreement between projects and the regulatory bodies, communities, or activist groups raising substantive environmental or heritage objections.
We are not retained by one side to defeat another; we are engaged to resolve the dispute itself. That means we work with — and earn the trust of — everyone with a stake in the outcome.
Boards, CEOs and general managers, chief legal officers, in-house counsel and social-performance teams carrying a project through a dispute with communities, landholders or NGOs.
Landowners affected by Australian mining and energy projects, and the communities around them — where being genuinely heard is the first step toward a durable agreement.
Non-government organisations and peak bodies seeking a resolved outcome rather than a prolonged public fight that hardens positions on every side.
Social-performance and regional managers at advisory firms, and law-firm partners, who bring in an independent resolver when a matter has moved beyond ordinary engagement.
A working paper from Equipoise & Co, drawing on three real (anonymised) patterns where litigation destroyed social licence and resolution preserved it. Coming Q4 2026 — register your interest below for an advance copy.
A book in motion, by Nick van der Hoven. Drawn from twenty years of stories from inside the resources sector and the rooms where the difficult agreements were made.
Read more →"Most negotiators arrive armed. The ones who win the impossible rooms arrive composed. The story of how I learned the difference began on a plastic chair under a tin roof, in a rural village in Africa, in the fifth week of a labour strike that should have closed the mine."
Equipoise & Co takes six to eight matters per year. If you believe yours is one of them, the questions below give us the context we need to respond. You will hear from us within five business days.