Women, Industrialization and the Environment in Indonesia

Abstract

The entrance into global markets through the acceleration of the industrialization process is considered to be the driving force of Indonesia’s economic development. This process relies predominantly on the utilization of natural resources. Indonesia is endowed with an extraordinary richness of natural resources, including 10 per cent of the earth’s tropical forests. But the ecology in both the rural and urban areas is seriously threatened by a variety of factors (World Bank 1994), especially on the island of Java. Industrialization is undoubtedly among the factors that affect the natural environment most directly, in both urban and rural communities.

The impact of environmental degradation is often greater on women because of … gender divisions of labour within households which allocate work such as firewood and water collection to women, precisely tasks which become more difficult with deforestation and falling water tables. However, from a gender analysis standpoint the costs of degradation cannot be assumed to fall predominantly on women without investigating how gender divisions of labour are contested and change under environmental stress … (Jackson 1993: 405)