Compliance officers keep asking me the wrong first question about the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. They ask whether their company is still in scope after the 2025 rollback. The more useful question is what the directive expects them to actually do on the ground. For any mining operation with European buyers or financiers, the answer reaches the mine gate whether or not the parent company sits directly under the law.
The directive, formally Directive (EU) 2024/1760, makes human rights and environmental due diligence a legal duty rather than a voluntary commitment. The Omnibus package that landed in the Official Journal in February 2026 narrowed who must comply and softened some edges. It did not touch the core. Companies must still run risk-based due diligence across their chain of activities, and they must still engage the people their operations affect. For mining, that means communities. This piece looks at what the law now requires in practice, and why meeting it through structured dialogue protects both the community’s rights and the investment behind the project.
What survived the Omnibus, and what it means for a mine
The headlines in 2025 and early 2026 were about retreat. The employee and turnover thresholds rose sharply. The directive now catches EU companies above 5,000 employees and 1.5 billion euros in net worldwide turnover. Non-EU companies are caught above 1.5 billion euros of net turnover inside the EU. That change cut the in-scope population by around 70 percent against the original 1,000-employee, 450-million-euro test. The obligation to put a climate transition plan into effect was removed. The EU-wide civil liability rule was dropped. Downstream due diligence was narrowed.
Read that list quickly and you might conclude the pressure is off. It is not. The obligation that matters most for community relations came through intact. In-scope companies must identify, prevent, mitigate, and account for adverse human rights and environmental impacts in their own operations, their subsidiaries, and their chains of activities. Article 13 still requires meaningful engagement with affected stakeholders through the due diligence steps. It still tells companies to identify and remove barriers to that engagement, and to protect people who raise concerns from retaliation.
The reach extends past the companies directly named. A mid-size miner selling concentrate to a European smelter, or drawing project finance from a European bank, sits in that buyer’s or lender’s chain of activities. The due diligence duty flows down the contract. So the practical scope of the directive, for mining, is far wider than the list of companies formally caught by the thresholds. If you supply Europe, the questions arrive at your door.
The gap between a due diligence file and a due diligence process
Here is where most operations go wrong. They treat due diligence as a document to be produced rather than a process to be run. A consultancy is hired, a human rights impact assessment is written, a risk register is populated, a policy is posted on the corporate website. The file is complete. The auditors are satisfied. And nothing changes in the relationship between the project and the people living next to it.
The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which the CSDDD codifies into European law, describe due diligence as an ongoing process with distinct steps. You identify and assess actual and potential impacts. You integrate the findings and act on them. You track whether the response works, communicate how impacts are addressed, and provide remediation where harm has occurred. Every one of those steps depends on knowing what is actually happening between the project and the community. You cannot assess an impact you have not heard about. You cannot track whether your mitigation works if you are not in contact with the people it was meant to protect.
A due diligence file records a snapshot. A due diligence process keeps a channel open. The distinction is not academic. When a resettlement grievance surfaces two years after households moved, the file will not tell you. A working relationship with the affected households will. The directive’s language on tracking effectiveness and providing remediation only functions if the company has a live line to the community, not a binder on a shelf. Auditors increasingly know the difference, and so do the communities who have watched a decade of glossy reports describe engagement they never experienced.
Courts are starting to draw the same line. In the La Poste case, the Paris Court of Appeal in June 2025 upheld a first-instance ruling under France’s Duty of Vigilance Law. It ordered the company to revise a vigilance plan that rested on a deficient risk mapping. The plan existed. It was not enough. A generic, boilerplate approach built on standardized questionnaires does not satisfy a due diligence duty. The statutes set the floor, and the work of due diligence begins above it. For mining, above the floor means site-specific, context-sensitive, and centered on the people who actually bear the impacts.
Engagement is the engine, not the add-on
Article 13 is often read as a procedural requirement bolted onto the real work of risk assessment. That reading gets the causation backwards. Engagement is how you find the risks in the first place.
A geologist can map an orebody. A hydrologist can model a water table. Neither can tell you that a proposed haul road cuts across the path women take to a market. Neither can tell you that a compensation rate which looks fair on a spreadsheet ignores the fruit trees that took twenty years to bear. Those impacts live in the knowledge of the people who will carry them. The assessment captures them only if the company sits down with those people early. That means a format where they can speak without fear, and a company willing to hear what the map does not show.
This is why the directive’s insistence on removing barriers to engagement matters so much. Barriers are not incidental. A consultation held only in the national language, in a district capital three hours away, at a time that conflicts with planting season, is a barrier. So is a meeting where the only people who speak are the ones already aligned with the company. Real engagement means designing the process so the affected, including the least powerful among them, can actually participate and be heard. The difference between meaningful engagement and box-ticking consultation is where most projects either build trust or forfeit it.
When engagement is treated as the engine of due diligence, the risk assessment gets sharper, the mitigation gets targeted, and the eventual disclosure has something real to describe. When it is treated as an add-on, the company produces a compliant file and inherits every risk it failed to hear about.
Remediation is the part companies skip
The directive does not stop at identifying and preventing harm. It requires companies to provide for remediation of actual adverse impacts they cause or contribute to. This is the third pillar of the UN Guiding Principles, access to remedy, and it is the part most mining operations treat as an afterthought. A grievance mechanism gets stood up, a box gets ticked, and the mechanism sits idle because nobody in the community trusts it or knows it exists.
A remediation duty you cannot deliver on is worse than none, because it manufactures the appearance of a channel while leaving the harm in place. Under the CSDDD, that gap is now a legal exposure, not just a reputational one. Suppose a household says its water source was fouled, or a farmer says the compensation never arrived. The company needs a route to hear the claim, assess it honestly, and put something right. That route has to be credible to the person raising the claim. In practice, that means it cannot be run entirely by the party accused of the harm.
This is where a mediated grievance process outperforms an internal complaints desk. An independent facilitator can hold the space for a claim to be heard, tested against the facts, and resolved on terms both sides accept. A well-designed grievance mechanism does more than log complaints. The design principles that separate a functioning channel from a dead letterbox are the subject of designing grievance mechanisms that actually resolve conflict. They map directly onto what the directive now expects a company to have in place. Remediation done well is not a cost center. It is the evidence, when an auditor or a court asks, that the due diligence process was real.
What good CSDDD-aligned engagement looks like in mining
Consider a scenario drawn from patterns across critical-minerals projects in the Andes and West Africa. A company entering the exploration-to-development transition faces a community already wary from a previous operator’s broken promises. The compliance-file approach would commission an impact assessment, hold two public meetings, and file the report. The due diligence process approach looks different.
It starts before the drilling expands, with a mapping of who is actually affected and who speaks for them, including the groups a quick survey would miss. It sets up a channel for concerns that people trust enough to use, which means a channel not controlled solely by the company. It brings the affected parties into the assessment of impacts rather than presenting them with conclusions. When disagreement surfaces, and it will, the process has a way to work through it that does not collapse into a standoff or a lawsuit.
That last point is where mediation earns its place. Structured, independent facilitation is the mechanism that lets a company and a community disagree productively, surface the impacts the assessment missed, and reach commitments both sides will keep. The pattern of catching friction early rather than after a blockade is the same logic behind helping companies avoid local escalations through early mediation. Done this way, the engagement the directive requires stops being a cost of compliance and becomes the thing that keeps the project running. The file gets written as a byproduct of a relationship that works, rather than as a substitute for one that does not.
Score your engagement against the directive before an auditor does
Before your next disclosure cycle, run your current community engagement through the CSDDD Community Engagement Readiness Checklist. It is a downloadable 16-point instrument organized into five sections. The sections cover scope and rightsholder mapping, engagement design and barriers, the grievance and remediation channel, tracking and effectiveness, and disclosure and governance. Each checkpoint maps to a specific due diligence expectation in the directive and the UN Guiding Principles, and you score it In place, Partial, or Absent. The Partial and Absent items are your exposure map. They show you exactly where a determined auditor, a European buyer’s procurement team, or a community grievance would find daylight between your file and your practice. Use it as an internal audit before someone external runs one for you. Download the CSDDD Community Engagement Readiness Checklist
Why a mediated approach beats a compliance file
The companies that will handle the CSDDD well are not the ones with the thickest binders. They are the ones that treat the law as an external push toward something they should have been doing anyway. That means talking to the people their project affects in a way that actually resolves disagreement. It is a mediation posture, and it is a discipline, not a document.
This is the work behind the Social Accord Architecture, the field-tested methodology I use to turn the abstract duty of engagement into a running process. Its logic is dual accountability. A structured dialogue is credible only when it answers to both sides, the community whose livelihoods are at stake and the company whose investment is exposed. The moment a process appears to favor one side, it loses the trust of the other. Corporate social responsibility programs communities do not trust, and activist campaigns companies dismiss, both fail that test. An independent, structured process passes it. In passing it, it produces exactly the evidence the directive wants: engagement that happened, concerns that were heard, and impacts that were addressed. The SAA (Social Accord Architecture) gives boardrooms and village halls a shared process and a common language for getting there.
Legislation can compel process. It cannot compel sincerity. Treat CSDDD as paperwork and you will produce paperwork, and inherit the conflict anyway. Treat it as the reason to finally build a working relationship with the community, and the compliance takes care of itself. To pressure-test your engagement against what the directive now expects, or to set up a structured dialogue on a project facing real friction, reach me at thomas@thomasgaultier.com.