The buyer nobody courts: the European public sector.

Almost every scheme on this Hub works on private demand: a brand commits, a refiner audits, a trader signs. MAX-D works on the other kind of demand. European public bodies are legally obliged to run competitive tenders, and those tenders can carry conditions — on human rights, on environmental practice, on what a supplier must be able to show about its own chain. A condition in a public contract is enforceable in a way a voluntary commitment is not, and it applies to every bidder at once.

The project’s stated aim is to “expand the public procurement market in Europe for responsible mining through tenders that reward supply chain actors with better human rights and environmental due diligence”. Electronics Watch, which coordinates it, is an organisation whose affiliates are public buyers; its model is to monitor conditions at the far end of their supply chains and bring findings back to the contract.

The other half is where the evidence comes from. Rather than commissioning audits, MAX-D builds monitoring capacity among the people already there — worker organisations and local civil society — training them in methodology, supply-chain due diligence, labour rights and occupational health and safety, and helping build complaint mechanisms and stronger cooperatives. The reports it generates cover artisanal, cooperative and large-scale mines, with forced labour and the worst forms of child labour named as the focus.