Conference Agenda

This paper exists to reimagine a future beyond extractive development by presenting regenerative, climate just, and gender just feminist development alternatives. While recognising that the responsibility for making change should not lie on women alone — but on policy-makers and decision-makers, including corporates — it seeks to highlight ways that women can call for and be part of creating and sustaining an Ecofeminist movement. In this way, the paper helps women challenge extractivist, patriarchal norms and conditions and respond to the ecological crises that directly affect their lives.

Uganda’s extractives sector has been rapidly transforming from small-scale and artisanal mining to large-scale industry in rural areas of the country. Extractives include oil, gas, and the accelerated licensing of mining operations as vast deposits of gold, uranium, copper, and rare earth minerals have been discovered. These operations are accompanied by mega ‘infrastructure’ investments — roads, pipelines, power lines, and dam projects — which serve the industry and displace local communities. Women bear the brunt of this. Land grabbing, insufficient regulations or implementation of the law, lack of compensation, and disputes between communities and companies cause grievances, loss of homes and livelihoods, and displacement — often with dire consequences.

The paper draws from the experiences of the Participation and Opportunities for Women’s Economic Rights (POWER) project, which was co-led by Ugandan organisations, NAPE and NAWAD, and UK-based global feminist organisation, Womankind Worldwide. By supporting women to gain practical, legal, and advocacy skills, POWER aimed to strengthen the Ecofeminist movement to promote and protect the economic rights of marginalised women affected by compulsory land acquisition in four districts of Uganda: Nwoya, Amuru, Hoima, and Buliisa.

This paper recommends women strengthen and sustain an Ecofeminist movement in Uganda to challenge and replace existing extractive and agribusiness economic models with feminist alternatives. To support this, it presents further recommendations on areas such as:

• Building community, cooperation and mutual care and making use of women’s own stories within the Ecofeminist movement.

• Reconceptualising women’s everyday actions to resist patriarchal norms as acts of resistance within the movement.

• Creating and championing women-only spaces.

• Conducting further, non-extractive, gender-sensitive research to strengthen the movement.

It also calls on decision-makers to create and sustain an enabling political environment for women’s activities within the Ecofeminist movement towards the ultimate goal of banning MNC (multinational corporations) extractives and moving towards agro-ecology as the framework for agriculture in Uganda.

The world faces a climate crisis due to the extraction and burning of fossil fuels which has supported industrialisation and capitalist expansion. One of the solutions to the climate crisis is to reduce carbon emissions by transitioning from a fossil fuel-based energy system to one based on renewable sources such as solar or wind energy. The just energy transition promises to address unemployment and poverty while reducing the carbon intensive nature of the energy system. However, this energy transition is complex and holds uncertainty and risk for many people, particularly communities and workers who depend on the coal value chain. This paper adopts a feminist political economy lens to explore the relationship between the development of renewable energy and gendered labour. This approach highlights the importance of the economy, the household and the state in the process of social reproduction. By analysing the impact of the development of solar power plants on the communities and workers in three towns in the Northern Cape, and focusing on the three components of social reproduction, I find that the energy transition in its current form will not deliver justice for the poor and working classes.

Industrial mining in South Africa goes back to the late 19th century, with platinum mining starting later in 1924. From the early industrial mining period until 2002 women were prohibited from doing underground production work. The exception to this rule were Asbestos mines which had women cobbers and sorters between 1893 and 1980 as a result of an explicit exemption of Asbestos mines from the Mines and Works Act no 27 of 1956 (McCulloch 2003; 2010). That means for over 150 years only men worked in underground occupations. It was only in 2004, almost 80 years after platinum mining began, that mining houses started hiring women to work full-time underground. Most of these women went into mining, not because they had aspirations of being miners, but due to unemployment, economic pressures and the crisis of social reproduction.

Similarly, mines employed them, not because they wanted women, but because legislation forced them to have at least 10% women in their complement. For women this attitude meant working in a world governed by androcentrism; from its norms, to how production was structured, to conceptions of safety, and occupational cultural scripts and practices. To survive, women have had to learn to negotiate not only mining, but masculinity in bodies seen as ‘foreign’ in underground spaces.

In this paper I ask, is the inclusion of women in mining occupations and sector, even with the economic strains they face, necessarily a radical rethinking of mining and extractive industries or a co-optation? What could a feminist reimagining of mining, a sector central across Africa, look like in light of arguments by ecofeminists about sustainability and the environment?

Over the course of India's forest governance history, from the centralized colonial and early post-colonial periods to gradual decentralization, significant changes have occurred in the indigenous peoples' relationship with forests. This relationship found meaning sometimes in everyday contestation for survival, sometimes in violent encounters in the forest and sometimes in courtrooms and judgements. Negotiating access to natural commons, using and caring for them, and offering accountability and responsibility for their management are all fundamentally political processes. Against the backdrop of expanding extractive industries and intense resource contestation in Central India, this paper employs a Feminist Political Ecology framework to examine the feminization of social environmental movements and their relevance to environmental governance.

The study draws upon the case of Baiga women's forest mobilization in Central India to highlight the intersection of gender and indigeneity in shaping forest resources, indigenous women's everyday lives and struggles over forest use and rights. Indigenous women's forest activism, rooted in their material realities, was prompted by their personal experiences of perceived environmental threats to family survival, lack of local institutions' accountability, and exclusion from decision-making bodies embedded within the overall patriarchal structures of society. While the political and economic effects of their activism are still unfolding, the research employs geospatial analysis to reveal the outcomes and effects of women-led mobilization on the condition of forest resources. Overall, this study offers valuable insights into the political and ecological significance of indigenous women's activism and the importance of gender and indigeneity in shaping environmental governance.