When it's the Slaves that Pay: In Search of a Fair Due Diligence Cost Distribution in Mineral Supply Chains

Modern slavery and conflict minerals are often treated as two separate grand challenges governed by different legislation, yet conflict mineral settings commonly involve and inflict slavery in supply chains. This paper focuses on due diligence in the context of conflict mineral supply chains, and in doing so provides important insights for modern slavery in general. Using more than 38 h of recordings from exploratory interviews with 46 experts from 43 organizations, our study investigates: a) how due diligence costs and benefits are actually distributed in supply chains in practice; and b) the means through which due diligence costs and benefits can be (more appropriately) shared.

Constantin Blome is Academic Dean of Lancaster University Leipzig since September 2022. He is also Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Operations & Production Management. Constantin's research interests include supply chain management, procurement and operations management with strong focus on sustainability, innovation and risk issues. In 2020 and 2021, he received the highly cited research award from Clarivate in the category "cross field", highlighting the top 0,1% cited scholars. Constantin is regular keynote speaker at academic and practitioner conferences. His research won several prestigious awards. Constantin is also co-owner and board member of two companies (n-side, Belgium, and Procurence, Poland). Overall, Constantin raised more than 5 million Euro research funding with a strong focus on industry funding.