Environmental Peacebuilding Association

Resource Extraction and Vulnerable Communities

Date & Time
Jun 18, 2026 | 16.00 - 17.30

Participants
Bocar Thiam (Guinea/United States)
Laura Kilbury, University of Massachusetts Boston
Joao Colaco, Carleton University (Mozambique)
Dengiyefa Angalapu, Niger Delta University (Nigeria)
Doris Buss, IMPACT

This panel explores the complex dynamics between communities and governance structures in extractive economies, highlighting how power, legitimacy, and recognition shape environmental outcomes. Within the gold mining sector, competing tensions between political elites, local populations, and mining operators contribute to complex conflict dynamics. While responsible mining aims to understand women’s social reproduction roles and utilize a participatory model to integrate women miners, it must also confront the societal impressions of mining as a masculine and dangerous field. In extractive communities where formal governance has collapsed, environmental control is legitimated through moral and religious authority with ecological exploitation justified as divine duty and taxation characterized as moral. Simultaneously, dominant extractive narratives can marginalize other forms of environmental harm, shaping which communities and crises receive attention. The variety of issues, interests, and governance challenges—and their interactions—discussed in the panel demonstrates the incredible sensitivity and complexity that resource extraction poses to environmental peacebuilders who hope to support the needs of local communities and their surrounding environments.

Resource Extraction and Vulnerable Communities

Caring for Gold: Social Reproduction and the Gendering of Mining's Social Value

When Extraction Speaks, Others Stay Silent: The Politics of Environmental Attention in the Niger Delta

State, Mining Operators, and Local Populations in the Struggle for Control of Gold Mining in Manica, Mozambique

Gold, God, and Governance: The Sacred Politics of Gold Frontiers