Melody McNeil: Above Ground First - What Mining Can Learn from International Development 

Melody McNeil is an agriculture and natural resource economist who has spent decades working with USAID and Catholic Relief Services across East and Central Africa, Afghanistan, and South Sudan - not inside mining companies, but alongside them, and who has seen first-hand what happens when above-ground conditions are treated as an afterthought.  The conversation centres on a deceptively simple question: if you were the CEO of a small exploration company, how would you do it? What unfolds is a genuinely thought-provoking discussion about how the extractive industries value risk, and whether they are truly accounting for the full picture. Melody argues that geology should not come first; that the moment exploration begins, expectations form, politics mobilise, and communities start to position themselves around what may or may not materialise. The cost of catching those signals late is often borne most heavily by the people least equipped to absorb it. Together, Melody and Sarah explore informal land tenure, benefit sharing, elite capture, and the idea of treating the operating environment as part of the asset itself - not a checklist to complete, but an input to every decision from day one. They also ask a more uncomfortable question: does knowledge gathered on the ground truly belong to the company that gathered it? And what happens when it never makes it back to the communities it came from? To hear more from Melody at the 2026 Responsible Raw Materials conference, where she speaks on ‘Creating Certainty Above Ground: How Stakeholder Alignment, Political Foresight, And Community Trust De-Risk Critical Mineral Projects’ visit:  https://responsiblerawmaterials.com/post/melody-mcneil-2026-creating-certainty-above-ground-how-stakeholder-alignment-political-foresight-and-community-trust-de-risk-critical-mineral-projectsmelody-mcneil-2026/