Networked Ecofeminist Activism, Politics of Coalition and the Articulation of Resistance Against Mining: Evidence from Southeast Sulawesi

Overview

Indonesia’s nickel downstreaming agenda has positioned mining expansion as part of a global green energy transition. In South-East Sulawesi, this expansion has intensified ecological degradation across inland nickel-mining zones and coastal stone-quarry areas. Women disproportionately experience these impacts through livelihood dispossession, increased unpaid reproductive labour, and heightened health risks. In this context, the central question is how networked ecofeminist activism shapes and constrains the consolidation of women’s ecological claims into sustained political pressure. Drawing on ecofeminist coalition politics, intersectionality, and theories of networked feminist activism, this article conceptualises networked ecofeminism as a relational field linking collective and connective action. It examines how ecofeminist activists articulate resistance and attempt to build solidarity across differentiated sites of extractive harm. First, it analyses how gendered ecological burdens are formed and rendered epistemically marginal within extractive governance. Second, it examines how two advocacy actors – the Coastal Women’s Network (JPP) and WALHI Southeast Sulawesi – translate these experiences through distinct representational strategies: case-based affective mediation and structural policy-oriented critique. Third, the analysis shows that shared ecological harm does not automatically produce coalition politics. Differences in scale, political language, and organisational position remain politically unarticulated, preventing the formation of a chain of equivalence linking community-based claims with structural critiques of extractive governance. As a result, relations between advocacy actors take an agonistic form in which divergent political orientations coexist without consolidating into a shared agenda. Finally, it argues that solidarity requires deliberate articulation across positional and strategic differences. Without such articulation, women’s ecological experiences risk circulating as fragmented narratives rather than consolidating into coordinated regulatory and democratic transformation.