Women, Disempowerment and Resistance: An Analysis of Logging and Mining Activities in the Pacific

There are many arguments supporting the need for a reduction of large scale logging and mining activities in Pacific Island countries. In addition to ecological and economic concerns, logging and mining have had significant social impacts, including gendered impacts. Women tend to be excluded from decision-making processes, and they have limited access to royalty payments and business and employment opportunities which emerge. Women also bear a disproportionate share of the responsibility for dealing with the social and environmental mess which accumulates. However, women are not simply passive victims of logging and mining activities, as this discussion of the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea will argue. They are often the first to feel dissatisfaction with logging and mining and it is such dissatisfaction which has fuelled civil unrest, from family break-ups to sabotage of machinery to civil war, in some communities. It may thus be useful for companies to more carefully monitor the effects of their activities on women and involve women more actively in decision-making bodies if they wish to avoid such unrest in the future.