Résumé
Mining is a land-based activity and mining companies have to negotiate with local landowners their license to operate. Even when they succeed in negotiating impact and benefit agreements with local communities, and start their operations, companies can face various claims and contests arising at various moments of the project cycle and that they are often unable to anticipate or analyse. The program presented in this contribution - NERVAL: 'negotiate, evaluate, and recognise the value of place' funded by the agency CNRT 'Nickel and its environment' - was conceived on these premises by an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, geographers, and economists. It developed, following a participatory and inter-sectoral logic, a research-based approach to provide stakeholders (mining companies, local governments, customary authorities) with an analytical grid helping them to decipher the land-related contexts and issues and to identify stakes and actors. Based on case studies carried out in mining localities of New Caledonia and a non-mining site, an analytical grid was developed around the four categories of territory, event, risk, and social actor. The paper presents and discusses this toolkit both in conceptual terms and as regards its operational potential.