Who we work for
Proponents
We work with proponents to build a legitimate development pathway.
Build a legitimate development pathway
Where proponents recognise that legitimacy is impacting value — and are seeking to recover value, create a credible development pathway, or explore a sale or joint venture — Spektrum will review the asset and assess whether legitimacy can be rebuilt or value responsibly realised.
Many assets with strong fundamentals - technically sound and economically attractive - fail to deliver approved value.
The cause is rarely geology, engineering, or market demand.
It is that legitimacy risks emerge late — during approvals, construction, or operations — when design choices are already locked in and capital is exposed.
When these risks surface, projects do not deteriorate gradually.
They stall, unravel, or become impaired.
What standard asset assessment captures — and what it misses
Proponents typically rely on a combination of:
Net Present Value (NPV) to assess economic merit, and
impairment frameworks to recognise downside risk over time.
These tools are necessary, but not sufficient.
NPV limitations
NPV assumes that:
Approvals proceed broadly as expected,
delays are incremental, and
risks are priced through discount rates or contingencies.
In contested assets, this assumption breaks down.
Legitimacy risks create step-change events — injunctions, political reversals, licence suspension, redesign — that are not well captured in expected-case modelling.
Why impairment methods do not protect proponents
Impairment frameworks are largely trigger-driven and backward-looking.
In practice, they:
Recognise loss only once revised forecasts or evidence exist.
Rely on management assumptions that often presume eventual resolution.
Treat delay poorly until it becomes material enough to force reforecasting.
Struggle with path-dependent risks where deliverability itself is uncertain.
Under weigh social, political, and reputational dynamics until they convert into cash impacts.
As a result, impairment often arrives after value has already been destroyed, not while it could still be governed.
We make the exposure visible: Legitimacy Value at Risk
Spektrum developed Legitimacy Value at Risk (L-VaR) to address this blind spot.
These risks are typically invisible in NPV and only partially visible in impairment logic — yet they often determine whether assets deliver value at all.
L-VaR complements existing financial analysis by answering a different question:
Is this asset deliverable as approved — and where is value exposed if legitimacy risks are not resolved early?
Our solution: Development by Consent©
Spektrum addresses Legitimacy Value at Risk through Development by Consent©
Development by Consent is a defined, end-to-end development process. It integrates community, Indigenous, environmental, engineering, legal, and financial considerations before and during approvals, rather than after decisions are effectively fixed.
At the front of each engagement, Spektrum establishes a DbC Lab to build a tailored project plan agreed to by the parties involved.
Once this plan is agreed, the Development by Consent process proceeds through its stages, with legitimacy, technical, environmental, legal, and financial considerations assessed together.
When proponents engage Spektrum
Proponents work with Spektrum when they want to:
reduce approval timelines and uncertainty
protect value before final investment decisions
address politically or socially contested assets
recover value from stalled or stranded projects
improve confidence that approved value will be delivered.
This applies to:
early-stage assets
advanced projects approaching approval
built or partly built assets unable to secure permits.
What proponents gain
Proponents gain:
earlier visibility of deliverability risk
fewer late-stage surprises
reduced delay and impairment exposure
clearer decision points for proceed / redesign / exit
stronger outcomes for communities and the environment
decisions that withstand regulatory, political, and public scrutiny.
Our Role
Spektrum is an independent development partner with a long-term commitment to shared outcomes.
Our role is to identify where value is exposed, make that exposure visible, and apply a disciplined development process to resolve it — so assets deliver value while leaving communities, environments, and institutions better off.
