Mining companies are increasingly called on to organize compensation activities for the villages close to mining sites, using a participatory approach. In the Guizhou Province of China, when a gold mine was opened, most of the land farmed in the surrounding villages was expropriated. The mining company set up a multi-stakeholder platform to identify compensation activities. The platform included representatives from the villages, local government, the mining company and a provincial university. The article examines the relations between the different actors and assesses the activities that were developed. The multi-stakeholder platform enabled some communication between participants, but village representatives had very little say in the decision-making. Many infrastructure projects were implemented, but most income-generating projects failed. The funding provided by the mining company did not compensate for the lack of institutional support for designing and implementing income-generating projects capable of providing sustainable livelihoods to the villagers.