Recent years have seen the development of a vast array of regulatory frameworks, codes of conduct and other regimes aiming at regulating international trade in so-called ‘conflict minerals’, mostly originating from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). National governments, international institutions and industry have contributed to a substantial development of standards that, however, appear to be built on an inadequate understanding of the causes that link conflict and minerals. This paper reviews the main existing initiatives from the perspective of their goals, scope and shortcomings, and contrasts them with the criticisms voiced by Congolese and international experts who are better in tune with the local reality. With this, this paper aims to discuss the fact that the current focus placed on perfecting existing regimes is carried out at the margin of local stakeholders, which renders existing initiatives inefficient at addressing the problem of conflict minerals and have perverse side effects for the local mining communities.
Just Castillo Iglesias (Wed,) studied this question.