Every once in a while, someone in the process says the quiet part out loud.

This time it was talk about an “industry playbook” and a “community playbook.”

Industry has their script. The community is supposed to have theirs. Everyone is encouraged to be “strategic,” “organized,” and “ready.”

On the surface, it sounds reasonable.

But sit with it for a second.

If there’s an industry playbook, and a community playbook…

Where’s the bureaucrat playbook?

Where’s the NGO playbook?

Why is it that the two sides most affected – industry and community – are allowed to be openly “strategic,” but the professional middle gets to pretend they’re just neutral referees?

They’re not neutral.

They’re not background.

They’re not above the fight.

They are the people who write the rules, pick the players, and call the end of the game.

And they are doing it with their own playbook.

This is the part nobody is supposed to say out loud.

The Two Playbooks You’re Allowed to Talk About

Let’s start with the ones we’re allowed to name.

1. The industry playbook

We all know this one by heart:

• Control the timeline.
• Control the data and the “expert” reports.
• Call the project “inevitable.”
• Promise jobs, benefits, “green future,” and “economic opportunity.”
• If people push back, add a “Community Benefits Agreement” like a tip jar on the side.

This is the hard power script.

It deals in money, contracts, legislation, and deadlines.

In a lot of big policy spaces, that hard power sits under global frameworks like the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals that every UN member state signed onto in 2015 (Except for the United States as it was never passed through the Senate).¹ Those goals are now the default language for “progress” and “development.” Whether we agreed to that or not, it’s the vocabulary that shows up in funding calls, policy papers, and corporate reports.

If the project blows up later, people blame “corporate greed.”

Industry can take that hit. It’s built into the story.

2. The community playbook

Then there’s the “community” side. We’re told to:

• show up to consultations,
• tell our stories,
• speak from the heart,
• sit in circles with sticky notes and flip charts,
• join “advisory committees” and “working groups.”

We are handed words like:

• “having a voice,”
• “being heard,”
• “co-creating solutions,”
• “building resilience.”

But here’s the thing:

The table, the room, the questions, and the options were all picked before we walked in the door.

There’s a long trail of research and human-rights commentary warning that public consultations often end up as information sessions about decisions already made or in the making, without giving people a real chance to shape the outcome.⁴

The “community playbook” is not a path to real power.

It is a managed reaction to a decision that has already been framed.

You are there to decorate the file with feelings.

The Playbook Nobody Names

Now we get to the missing piece.

The playbook that belongs to:

• the bureaucrats – the career staff inside government departments, agencies, boards;
• the NGOs – the organizations funded to “work with community,” “build capacity,” and “facilitate dialogue.”

Together, they run the bureaucrat/NGO playbook.

What do they actually do?

• They design the process: what meetings happen, in what order, with what goals.
• They decide who counts as a “stakeholder” and who never gets an invite.
• They write the toolkits, guides, and frameworks everyone else gets trained on.
• They translate big global language – climate goals, SDGs, UNDRIP, “just transition,” “resilience” – into local policy talk.¹ ³
• They file the reports that say, “The community was consulted.”

They are not neutral.

They are not spectators.

They are the ones who turn power into paperwork and conflict into “managed outcomes.”

But you’ll never see them call it a playbook.

They call it:

• “good governance,”
• “capacity-building,”
• “community engagement,”
• “evidence-based decision-making.”

Nice, soft words.

Behind them is a very clear script.

Why Their Playbook Has to Stay Invisible

If the bureaucrat/NGO playbook was named openly, people might start asking a few very basic questions:

• Who funds you to do this?
• What outcomes are you rewarded for?
• Who trained you, and using whose curriculum?
• What happens if communities say no?

Once you ask those questions, it becomes obvious that:

• Industry is openly self-interested.
• Community is openly emotional and divided.
• And the professional middle is neither neutral nor innocent.

We already know that consultation and “stakeholder engagement” are used to build legitimacy for regulatory and policy decisions – to make people more likely to accept the process and the outcome, even when they don’t fully agree.⁶

The story is arranged so that:

• if the project goes bad → blame industry greed;
• if pushback gets messy → blame community division;
• the bureaucrats and NGOs → quietly move on to the next community, the next project, the next grant.

Their playbook works only if they stay invisible.

They need everyone to see them as “Helper,” “Partner,” or “Facilitator,” never as a political actor with their own interests.

How the Middle Scripts Both Sides

Here’s how the bureaucrat/NGO playbook looks in practice.

1. Design the funnel, call it consultation

Step one: decide the range of “acceptable” outcomes first.

Step two: design a process that nudges everyone into that narrow lane.

Step three: tell people they are “co-creating solutions.”

You’ll hear versions of:

“The world is changing. This is happening everywhere. We need to adapt.”

That language is doing a job. It quietly removes the choice of whether something should happen and focuses only on how it will happen.

Work on Indigenous rights and public participation has been very blunt about this: too many consultations end up as mechanisms for providing Indigenous peoples and local communities with information about decisions already made or in the making, without allowing them to genuinely influence the decision-making process.⁴

Once you accept that frame, you’re already inside their funnel.

If you question the “whether,” you’ll be told you’re “not being constructive.”

2. Hand-pick community “representatives”

There is always a short list of “community leaders” or “stakeholder reps”:

• They show up in every committee and working group.
• They get quoted in the media and final reports.
• They are flown to conferences to talk about “our community’s journey.”

They’re told they are “bridging the gap” and “helping both sides.”

But their real job in the playbook is simple:

They become the face of consent.

They didn’t set the terms. They didn’t write the agreements. But they are the ones standing in the photo smiling.

When people get angry later, they’re often the ones who take the heat.

3. Use “healing spaces” to manage resistance

The language of care gets weaponized:

• “safe spaces,”
• “trauma-informed facilitation,”
• “healing dialogues,”
• “circles of understanding.”

These tools can be valuable in real community work.

Inside this playbook, they get twisted into something else.

They’re used to:

• defuse anger that might grow into organized resistance;
• reframe structural harm as a problem of “hurt feelings” or “misunderstandings”;
• coach people to make “reasonable” asks that fit existing funding rules.

Your pain gets acknowledged.

Your power gets softened and redirected.

4. Turn people into numbers

At the end of the day, what gets reported up the chain is not your reality.

It’s metrics.

Across the “community engagement” and “stakeholder engagement” world, you can find endless guides on how to measure success using key performance indicators: number of meetings, number of participants, percentage of residents reached, activity rates, satisfaction scores, and so on.⁹ ¹⁰

“Community consent” becomes a line in a spreadsheet and a pie chart in a PDF.

If you object later, they can point to the file:

“We consulted you. See Appendix C.”

The bureaucrat/NGO playbook cares about proof on paper, not lived truth on the ground.

The Consent Equation in Plain Terms

Here’s how I see it: this is the Consent Equation at work.

• Industry playbook = money, projects, legal structure, timelines.
• Community playbook = stories, emotions, trust, “resilience,” “inclusion.”
• Bureaucrat/NGO playbook = the machine that lines those two up just enough to stamp “consent” on the file.

There’s also a formal standard sitting in the background: Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). Under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, states are supposed to consult and cooperate in good faith with Indigenous peoples, through their own institutions, to obtain their free, prior, and informed consent before adopting measures that may affect them.² ³

On paper, FPIC is about the right to say yes or no in a way that is free of pressure, early enough to matter, and based on real information.

In practice, even legal and policy reviews warn that too many processes fall short: they give Indigenous peoples and local communities only limited ability to influence decisions, or they simply inform them about decisions already made.⁴

In those cases, you are not being asked for free, informed, meaningful consent.

You are being processed.

And the output they need is not your understanding. It’s a sentence:

“Stakeholders have been consulted and support the path forward.”

That one sentence is worth more than any town hall.

It’s what unlocks the money, the approvals, and the political cover to move on.

And if you refuse to be processed?

Then the playbook has a page for that too.

You become:

• “uncooperative,”
• “divisive,”
• “radical,”
• “hard to work with,”
• “against progress.”
• "crazy"
• "conspiracy theorist"

Not because you’re wrong.

Because you won’t fit in the template.

What Happens to People Who Won’t Stick to the Script

There is no bureaucrat/NGO playbook without soft enforcement.

They don’t need police for this stage. They have other tools.

Here’s what usually happens to people who step outside the script:

1. You get sidelined.
2. Your name disappears from invite lists. Meetings happen without you. Decisions are “already made” by the time you hear about them.
3. You get pathologized.
4. Your political objections become a “personal issue.”
5. People whisper that you’re “angry,” “unstable,” “traumatized,” or “can’t let go.”
6. You get replaced.
7. New committees are formed. New “representatives” appear. Suddenly there’s a “fresh team” that’s much easier to manage.
8. You become the problem to be managed.
9. All of a sudden, “progress” would be going smoothly if not for “a few loud voices.”

I've personally hit all of these over time. Simply for asking the unpopular questions.

The project stays on track.

The process keeps moving.

And the file still closes with “community engagement completed.”

How to Spot the Bureaucrat/NGO Playbook

You don’t need to see the actual manual. You just have to listen and watch.

Here are some red flags:

1. The outcome sounds inevitable from day one.
2. Any real “no” is off the table. The only choices offered are about timing, style, or spin.
3. This matches long-standing critiques: participation that arrives late in the process, when core decisions are already locked in, cannot meaningfully change the outcome.⁴ ⁵
4. The hardest questions never get a straight answer.
5. Land, long-term control, veto power, and genuine ownership always get pushed to “further study” or “a different level of government.”
6. The same faces are everywhere.
7. A small circle of “community leaders” appears on every steering committee, task force, and advisory panel. They always seem to arrive at the same careful, middle-of-the-road conclusions.
8. The money trail matches the story line.
9. Grants flow to projects that act out the desired narrative: “resilience,” “food security,” “economic transition,” “climate adaptation,” all without touching the core power imbalance.
10. Conflict is treated as a misunderstanding.
11. People are told, “If everyone had the facts, we’d agree.”
12. That’s a way to dodge the reality that values and power are in conflict, not information.

Meanwhile, the NGO world itself has been going through what researchers call “NGOization” – a shift from broad, horizontal grassroots movements to more vertical, professionalized organizations that are often more accountable to funders and institutions than to local members.⁷ ⁸

When you start seeing these patterns, you’re not paranoid.

You’re finally reading the third playbook.

Naming the Third Playbook

Why does it matter to name this?

Because as long as we only talk about an “industry playbook” and a “community playbook,” we are stuck playing on a rigged board.

Industry can admit their agenda.

The community is expected to wear its heart on its sleeve.

Meanwhile, the bureaucrats and NGOs:

• write the rules,
• manage the conflict,
• shape the story,
• and walk away clean.

Once you say:

“There is also a bureaucrat/NGO playbook,”

you drag the scriptwriters out of the shadows and onto the stage where they belong.

You can start asking:

• Who gave you the right to define what “consent” looks like?
• Who trained you to do this, and who pays you?
• What happens to your funding if the community says no?

Those questions alone crack the frame.

Refusing to Be Processed

Here’s where I land:

You are not “unreasonable” for asking who wrote the script.

You are not “divisive” for refusing to be packaged as a success story.

You are not “against progress” for saying the process itself is crooked.

You are allowed to say:

I’m not here to make your metrics look good.

I’m not here to read the lines you wrote for me.

I’m here to decide what happens to my home, my land, and my future — and that won’t fit in your form.

The most dangerous thing a community can do is stop acting like an audience and start behaving like an author.

You don’t have to accept their roles.

You don’t have to stay inside their play.

You can walk out of the script, name the third playbook, and start writing your own.

See also

• Lines on the Map: What Happens After Rights Recognition
• The Next Comfort Line: From Programs to Property
• More Cards, Same Cage: How Bill S-2 Expands the Circle Benwah Sits In

References