Gendering the Field: Towards Sustainable Livelihoods for Mining Communities

This volume presents a selection of papers that were presented at an international workshop on ‘Mining, Gender and Sustainable Livelihoods’, organised to disseminate the results of an ‘action research’ project. The project endeavoured to integrate a gender outlook in one major mining company’s community development initiatives, and strengthen interdisciplinary approaches in examining the interface between gender, mining and sustainable livelihoods (EC 2007). Held in late 2008 in the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program (RMAP) of The Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, the workshop was, for a number of reasons, an important international event in the field of social and community issues surrounding the extractive industries. It represented a confluence of several streams of thought and disciplinary approaches to gender and mining. The significance of this confluence lies in its holistic approach, through a conflation of community and gender interests, to the broad field of mining—without separating large and formal mining from informal, artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) practices. Academics and other researchers, activists, civil society organisations and policy-makers who participated in the workshop joined hands to address the increasingly important question of how to engender the field of mining. Above all, the workshop brought together, on the same platform, the collective wisdom of many of the key people actively working on mining and gender in a wide variety of contexts, with different lenses and from different perspectives. The chapters in this volume highlight the key issues and implications of integrating gender to foster sustainable livelihoods in both large-scale and informal, artisanal and small-scale mining in different parts of the world.