Necessity of Core Responsibility

The understanding of a company's core responsibility attempts to address the problem described above. The model of core responsibility offers an approach with which the measures surrounding CSR and sustainability can be placed in an economic and social responsibility context at a normative-strategic level of corporate management and development.

This provides management with an instrument that can be used to determine both the scope and the resulting limits of responsibility for an individual company on a well-founded basis. Specific measures that have been developed and tested in the context of CSR or sustainability discussions (for examples see the second part of this book) can be connected at the operational level without losing sight of the core of responsibility.

The definition of core responsibility gives CSR and sustainability activities a company-specific, reliable point of reference. By defining their specific core responsibility, a framework is created for the otherwise widely ramified responsibilities of companies.

This solves the problem that if you are responsible for everything, you are basically responsible for nothing. Similar to the previously discussed distribution of responsibility among so many stakeholders until the divided responsibility is so small in the end that, figuratively speaking, no responsibility remains for the individual.

On the contrary, boundaries are important: just as the walls of a house form the rooms of the house in the first place and at the same time demarcate them from the outside, the individual core responsibility of a company determines the sphere of the objects for which it is responsible and for which it no longer bears responsibility for good reason. See also Schmidt below.

Determining the scope and limits of a corporate´s responsibility is also important for the mining industry. Activities in the raw materials sector are diverse and affect numerous areas of our economic and social life. At first glance, one often associates the environmental aspects of the extractive sector, such as deforestation caused by mining.

One example is the deforestation of large areas in the Brazilian Amazon: Sonter, l.J. et al (2017): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00557-w (last accessed 2025-04-01).

Another example is the contamination of entire ecosystems, such as the death of a river in Zambia after acidic waste leaked from a Chinese-owned mine: Kille, R./ Zimba, J. (2025): https://apnews.com/article/mining-pollution-china-zambia-environment-93ee91d1156471aaf9a7ebd6f51333c1?taid=67d5ef07c188230001078197 (last accessed 2025-04-01).

However, societal and social issues are also affected. Just think of the changes to the landscape and its impacts on the quality of life of people residing in the vicinity of a mining area. Finally, the possible need to resettle people from a designated mining area to a new location can also cause considerable problems for those affected. However also internal issues, such as modern working and safety standards for employees, can challenge a mining company’s ethical responsibility. The concept of core responsibility can help to define the sphere of responsibility of an organization, and perhaps even a sector, in a well-founded and resilient manner. This can clarify what an organization is (still) responsible for and, by extension, what it is not (no longer) responsible for.