Beyond 'Community': Social Differentiation and Lived Experiences of Heavy Mineral Sands Mining in Southern Mozambique

Heavy mineral sands mining has been promoted as a cornerstone of Mozambique’s development strategy, promising employment, infrastructure, and improved living conditions for host communities. Drawing on five months of qualitative fieldwork (2022–2023) in a mining-affected community in southern Mozambique, this article examines who benefits from heavy sands mining and who does not, and why. Combining intersectional feminist political ecology and geography with elements of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, we analyse how a heavy sands mine and associated resettlement reshaped diverse actors’ livelihood assets and opportunities. We show that material gains such as brick housing, electricity and piped water coexisted with substantial loss of land, fruit trees and autonomy, alongside intensified labour burdens, precarious employment trajectories, and widespread perceptions of broken promises and state–company collusion. These outcomes were patterned by intersecting social positions, especially gender, age, marital status and access to wage labour, producing uneven capacities to cope, adapt and claim benefits. Beyond measurable assets, land and trees emerged as place-based anchors of identity, social relations and cultural life, revealing the limits of technocratic livelihood restoration and resilience narratives that depoliticize responsibility. The findings complicate notions of ‘community acceptance’ and ‘social license to operate’ by highlighting fragmented legitimacy and trust shaped by opaque communication, unilateral compensation changes, and exclusionary engagement. We conclude that extractive governance and impact assessment must move beyond homogenizing ‘community’ frames toward transparent, differentiated and place-sensitive restitution and accountability mechanisms that address temporal, relational and non-material dimensions of loss.