Asia-Pacific Environment Monograph 6

Gendering the Field: Towards Sustainable Livelihoods for Mining Communities

The chapters in this book offer concrete examples from all over the world to show how
community livelihoods in mineral-rich tracts can be more sustainable by fully integrating
gender concerns into all aspects of the relationship between mining practices and mine affected
communities. By looking at the mining industry and the mine-affected communities through
a gender lens, the authors indicate a variety of practical strategies to mitigate the impacts of
Gendering the Field:
mining on women’s livelihoods without undermining women’s voice and status within the Towards Sustainable Livelihoods
mine-affected communities.

The term ‘field’ in the title of this volume is not restricted to the open-cut pits of large scale
for Mining Communities
mining operations which are male-dominated workplaces, or with mining as a masculine,
capital-intensive industry, but also connotes the wider range of mineral extractive practices Edited by Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt
which are carried out informally by women and men of artisanal communities at much smaller
geographical scales throughout the mineral-rich tracts of poorer countries.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

K untala Lahiri-Dutt is currently a Fellow in the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific

Program in the Crawford School of Economics and Government at The Australian National
University. Kuntala has extensively researched the complex interface between mining, gender
and community since 1994, first in the collieries and informal quarries of South Asia, and more
recently in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries. Her current research aims to refine
the contemporary feminist perspective on extractive industries, including the informal mining
practices and mineral-based peasant livelihoods of women and men. Kuntala has published on the
impacts of mining and mine-related displacement on women, on women’s participation in large
and small-scale mining in India and Indonesia, and on women’s perceptions of work in Indian

Edited by Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt

collieries. Her previous book on gender and mining, Women Miners in Developing Countries: Pit
Women and Others, jointly edited with Martha Macintyre, was published by Ashgate in 2006.

APEM 6
ANU E Press
http://epress.anu.edu.au