Jonathan Manullang is a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Basic Income Earth Network

The Martabe Gold Mine in North Sumatra, operated by PT Agincourt Resources, is frequently presented as a flagship of extractive-led development in Indonesia. Yet, when examined through a gendered lens, its impacts appear far more ambivalent and contested. However, following a regulatory suspension triggered by the catastrophic Sumatra floods of late 2025, the mine is now set to resume operations in mid-May 2026. This restart, granted under tighter environmental oversight and a mandatory independent audit, underscores the contested nature of its impact.

Women in Batang Toru are not merely beneficiaries of economic growth. They occupy multiple, often contradictory positions – as workers, dependants, and disproportionately burdened stakeholders within a rapidly transforming socio-ecological landscape.

Opportunities and Limits

One of the most visible links between the Martabe mine and women’s lives lies in employment and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Company disclosures indicate that women comprise approximately 21 per cent of the workforce, with a notable share occupying managerial roles. This exceeds the overall estimate for female participation in the global mining workforce, which remains around 12 per cent.

For some women, employment at Martabe has facilitated access to stable income, enhanced financial autonomy, and opened limited pathways into leadership. Corporate programmes further seek to promote women’s economic participation through small enterprise development and livelihood training.

However, these gains remain partial and uneven. Women continue to be concentrated in non-technical and support roles, while access to employment is stratified along lines of skill, mobility, and locality.

A socio-economic study of the project found that only around half of the workforce is drawn from local communities, reflecting persistent barriers that limit the extent to which local women can access higher-value opportunities. As such, while the mine expands economic possibilities for some, it does little to fundamentally reconfigure entrenched gender hierarchies.

Community Development and Gendered Welfare

The mine has also contributed to broader improvements in infrastructure, food systems, and education in surrounding areas, and these changes carry significant gendered implications.

In Batak society, women play a central role in sustaining household welfare, managing water and food resources, and maintaining family health. Improvements in healthcare provision can strengthen maternal and child health outcomes, while expanded educational access opens new possibilities for younger generations of women. Reduced economic precarity may also alleviate some of the reproductive burdens borne by women as primary caregivers.

Yet these benefits are unevenly distributed. Development gains tend to be concentrated in communities that are geographically proximate to, or economically integrated with, the mine. Women in more remote or marginalised communities often experience far fewer improvements.

Moreover, CSR initiatives frequently emphasise small-scale entrepreneurship – interventions that, while valuable, operate on a markedly different scale from the structural transformations driven by extractive capital. In this sense, such programmes risk reinforcing, rather than fundamentally transforming, existing gender roles and inequalities.

Environmental Change and Women’s Livelihoods

The most consequential pathway through which the Martabe mine reshapes women’s lives is environmental change. The Batang Toru ecosystem constitutes a critical source of water, food, and ecological stability for surrounding communities.

Environmental organisations have raised concerns regarding deforestation, hydrological disruption, and heightened risks of flooding and landslides associated with extractive activity in the region. While these accounts do not always foreground gender, their implications are inherently gendered.

Testimonies from communities in the wider Batang Toru area point to declining water quality and increasing difficulty in accessing clean water, alongside associated health concerns such as skin irritation. These pressures are disproportionately borne by women, who are primarily responsible for securing water and safeguarding household health. Environmental degradation thus translates directly into intensified labour burdens and heightened vulnerability in everyday life.

Although these experiences are not always attributed exclusively to the Martabe Gold Mine, they occur within the same ecological system shaped by cumulative extractive pressures.

The reality of these risks was tragically realised in November 2025, when deadly flash floods and landslides swept across North Sumatra, leading to a temporary government shutdown of the mine amid allegations of environmental non-compliance. While the Ministry of Environment has cleared the mine to restart, it has done so only on the condition that an independent audit identifies necessary management improvements – a process that directly responds to the hydrological disruption that continues to burden local women.

These impacts are not evenly distributed. Women with limited access to resources or decision-making power face greater challenges in coping with and recovering from environmental shocks. In this context, ecological instability interacts with pre-existing gender inequalities to produce differentiated patterns of vulnerability and resilience.

Agents of Resistance

Despite these constraints, women in Batang Toru are not passive recipients of change. They have also emerged as active participants in local resistance to extractive expansion.

Reports document women’s involvement in community mobilisation, including participation in demonstrations, opposition to land surveying activities, and advocacy for the protection of customary land rights. Such engagement reflects a broader pattern observed across extractive frontiers, where women frequently assume visible and influential roles in environmental and social movements.

This form of agency complicates dominant narratives of empowerment centred solely on corporate inclusion. While companies may frame women’s participation in terms of employment and entrepreneurship, women themselves are articulating alternative visions of development – ones that prioritise environmental sustainability, territorial rights, and collective wellbeing over extractive growth.

A Dual Reality

As the mine prepares to reopen, the dual reality for women in Batang Toru has reached a critical juncture. The government’s move to mandate independent oversight and potential environmental fines suggests a shift toward accountability, yet the fundamental tension remains: can a restart under tighter regulation truly mitigate the structural vulnerabilities exposed by the 2025 disaster?

On the one hand, the mine creates opportunities for employment, income generation, and improved access to services. For some women, particularly those directly engaged in the mine’s economic networks, these represent tangible improvements in quality of life.

On the other hand, the mine contributes to environmental and social changes that disproportionately burden women. The degradation of natural resources, heightened disaster risk, and unequal distribution of economic benefits produce new forms of precarity that are not adequately addressed by existing development interventions.

This duality reflects a broader tension inherent in extractive development: economic gains are accompanied by social and ecological costs, and these costs are unevenly distributed. Women, by virtue of their roles within households and communities, frequently bear a disproportionate share of these burdens.

Conclusion

The Martabe Gold Mine illustrates the complex and often contradictory ways in which extractive industries shape women’s lives. While it expands opportunities for economic participation and contributes to regional development, it simultaneously transforms the environmental and social conditions that underpin daily life.

Understanding these dynamics requires moving beyond simplified narratives of empowerment to interrogate the structural relationships between extraction, environment, and gender. It also demands recognising women not only as beneficiaries or victims, but as active agents engaged in shaping the future of their communities.

In Batang Toru, women stand at the intersection of these forces, asserting their voices in ongoing struggles over land, resources, and the meaning of development itself.

Photo by Suradeach Saetang on Unsplash.

The opinions expressed are those of the contributor, not necessarily of the RSAA.