- Benefit theater
- The failure mode in which community benefits are structured to read as manipulation rather than partnership — typically because they arrive late, as a company-controlled lump sum before a vote, or fail to materialize as promised — deepening distrust instead of easing it.
- Consent as binding constraint
- The thesis that community acceptance, not power, land, or capital, is now the scarce input that determines where infrastructure can physically be built — a factor capable, on its own, of vetoing an otherwise strong site.
- Consent-adjusted site score
- A fused decision instrument in which opposition, reputational-risk, and permitting intelligence weigh alongside power, land, water, and fiber — partly as gates that can veto a site and partly as priced-in delay and cost — rather than being stapled on as separate reports.
- Cumulative burden
- The compounding local impact of successive projects in one area; the strongest predictor of opposition, because acceptance falls sharply from a community's first project to its fourth as residents weigh the combined strain on traffic, water, and local character.
- Escalation trigger
- An observable event marking movement to a more organized stage of opposition — a group naming itself, a reporter probing the water contract, a regional organizer appearing — that signals a concern is hardening into a campaign and that a planned response should fire.
- Opposition register
- A structured, living model of the social terrain around a project that maps actors (interest, influence, stance), records stated versus underlying grievances, and defines escalation triggers with pre-planned responses, so opposition can be forecast rather than merely observed.
- Performative consultation
- Engagement conducted for appearance only, in which input is solicited but the project does not change; more damaging than no consultation because it produces documented proof, gathered at the operator's own meetings, that the process was a formality.
- The fait accompli insult
- The widespread grievance that a siting decision was made elsewhere before the community was consulted; often the deepest driver of opposition, because it makes residents read every later concession as manipulation regardless of the project's technical merits.