198 KEYWORDS Voluntary Sustainability Standards, ESG, Strong sustainability, Responsible Mineral Supply Chains, Sustainability Assessment Methodology 1. INTRODUCTION The global transition toward low-carbon and digital economies is intensifying demand for minerals critical to renewable energy systems, electrification, and infrastructure development. At the same time, mining activities continue to face heightened scrutiny regarding environmental degradation, social conflict, and governance failures. This dual pressure, accelerated mineral demand and rising societal expectations, has amplified the role of Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) in mineral supply chains. VSS have emerged as key instruments of transnational private governance, seeking to regulate corporate behavior beyond state-based mechanisms (Bennett, 2016; Cashore, 2002). In the mining sector, standards such as the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA), the Aluminium Stewardship Initiative (ASI), and the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI) aim to operationalize responsible sourcing through certification, due diligence requirements, and third-party auditing. These standards increasingly interact with public regulatory frameworks, including the OECD Due Diligence Guidance (OECD, 2018) and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (OHCHR), 2011), forming hybrid governance configurations in mineral supply chains. Despite their proliferation, systematic academic evaluation of mining-related VSS remains limited. Existing assessments often focus on transparency, governance structure, or coverage of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics (Erdmann & Franken, 2022; Marx et al., 2015), yet rarely examine the extent to which such standards align with broader sustainability paradigms grounded in ecological limits and minimum social foundations. In practice, many evaluations emphasize procedural robustness, such as the existence of policies, audits, or grievance mechanisms, without distinguishing between management-based compliance and alignment with system-level sustainability thresholds. This paper addresses this gap by developing and applying a dual-lens methodological tool designed to assess both operational alignment with international frameworks and normative ambition grounded in strong sustainability principles. By integrating operational best-practice frameworks with ecological and social threshold-based paradigms, the study seeks to provide a more differentiated and structured evaluation of mining VSS. The document is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the conceptual framework on which the dual perspective approach is based. Section 3 presents the methodological design
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