Think Development Blog

In 2017, the Asian Development Bank approved a US$200 million loan for Sri Lanka’s first large-scale wind energy project on Mannar Island. Three years later, the turbines of the Thambapavani Wind Farm rose along a small Tamil fishing village that lies at or below sea level called Konniyan Kudiyirippu. Among those who watched them go up was Vashingtina, a kindergarten teacher and mother of two, who has lived there for nearly twenty years, and lived there long enough to know when the palmyrah, the palm whose leaves and fruit sustain much of this coast’s economy, is ready to cut. While men in the village fished, women cut palmyrah leaves, harvested kottakilangu, grew moringa and vegetables, and kept livestock. ‘We use everything from nature to earn an income,’ she explains.

Before construction began, consultation meetings were held in the village, where residents repeatedly said they did not want the turbines. ‘When we said no,’ Vashingtina recalls, ‘they told us this is a government project so it cannot be stopped.’ These meetings, however, were entered in the project record as evidence that consultation had taken place. Concerns were documented and participation recorded. But the refusals left no corresponding trace. Residents later discovered that the signatures and identity details collected from families receiving food rations had been produced as evidence of the community’s consent to the wind farm. ‘We gave our signatures when the food rations were given to us,’ Vashingtina claims. ‘Now they are showing those signatures as our consent to the wind power project.’ This is the problem of intelligibility that runs through Spivak’s (1988) account of ‘epistemic violence’, where the capacity to speak offers little political purchase when the structures receiving that speech cannot recognise the claim being made.

In Mannar, this problem extends beyond consultation. Tamil and Muslim fisherfolk are recognised by the state as citizens, but they are not seen as authorities on the places in which they live. Their knowledge of the coast – such as its water, soil, fisheries and seasons – does not carry the same weight as the technical knowledge used to decide where turbines should be built. This gap between citizenship and authority is not incidental. The postcolonial Sri Lankan state has long imagined the nation in Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarian terms. And within that imagination the Tamil and Muslim north figures as a periphery to be secured, settled, developed, and not as a constituency whose knowledge of place should shape its future. We use ‘non-national subjecthood’ to describe this condition. People might hold citizenship but stand outside the nation as it is imagined, and therefore their knowledge and claims carry little authority in decisions over the land and sea on which their lives depend.

This condition also has a longer history. Renewable energy arrives in a region already shaped by war, displacement, militarisation and successive forms of state-led development, which have long reordered relations between minority communities, land, and the state. And while the green transition brings new institutions, finance and expertise, familiar questions remain over who has the authority to define land and determine its use. Work on ‘climate coloniality’ shows how older relations of power persist within climate action itself, and research on renewable-energy frontiers demonstrates how land is reclassified for green investment. The ADB itself described the island as a ‘dry and barren peninsula’ while emphasising its considerable renewable-energy potential.

Women occupy the sharpest edge of this erasure. Consultations for the project were held largely in shops and public spaces dominated by men, and women’s knowledge of cultivation, water management and the water’s seasonal movement received little attention in the wind farm’s technical assessment. Soon after construction, the village began flooding repeatedly. Wells became contaminated, gardens were destroyed, and land that had sustained palmyrah, moringa and livestock became increasingly unusable. But this risk of flooding was not unknown. The Environmental Impact Assessment had itself recorded the area’s vulnerability to heavy rains, revealing that this knowledge existed not only in formal assessments but also among the women who worked the land. But neither was sufficient to halt the project. The cost that followed was further absorbed by women who had to cook in flooded houses, manage sanitation when toilets could no longer be used, keep children away from sewage-contaminated water, and care for those who became ill. Describing illnesses linked to the contaminated water, Vashingtina eventually reached the limits of what she could say about women’s bodies: ‘We get unspeakable sicknesses too, can’t even tell.’ Thus, some of the project’s most intimate consequences remained the hardest to articulate, let alone have recognised as evidence of its harm.

Despite all this damage residents reported caused by the existing wind farm, plans to expand wind development in Mannar only proceeded further. In August 2025,  residents, comprising fishers, farmers, women, youth, and religious leaders, began a protest that continued for over 70 days and thousands marched in a general strike in September . They spoke of damaged waterways, fish breeding grounds, migratory routes and declining catches, drawing on the same knowledge of land and sea that had found little place in the assessments governing wind development. More importantly, they demanded a halt to further construction, and insisted on a say in whether, and on what terms, wind development could continue along their coast. Yet, on 26 September, turbine components were transported towards the construction site under police escort. Residents sat in the road before the convoy and refused to let it pass. Not long after, police and Special Task Force personnel advanced with batons and shields, beating protesters and clearing the road. Several protesters, including women and priests, were hospitalised, and cases were subsequently filed against nine demonstrators. This violence, however, did not mark a break with what had come before. Instead, it merely exposed the coercion that underwrites a system in which communities may be consulted without being able to refuse. And it is here that non-national subjecthood is at its starkest: Tamil and Muslim fisherfolk remain citizens, while the authority to decide what happens to the coast they live and work on is exercised elsewhere.

What is at stake in Mannar, then, is not only where wind turbines should be built, but who has the authority to decide. The green transition has arrived in the Northern Province through the language of climate urgency, renewable-energy targets, and development. But it has also entered a landscape in which the authority to define land and decide its future has long been unequally held. Decarbonisation may change what land is being claimed for without changing who has the authority to decide its use. In Mannar, those who know the coast through fishing its waters, cultivating its soil and living with its seasonal changes remain largely without the power to determine how it is transformed. The danger, therefore, is that a transition undertaken in the name of planetary survival reproduces the very inequalities through which this landscape has long been governed.

Authors’ Bio

Dr Thiruni Kelegama (Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford) is a Political Geographer and Development Studies expert focused on the socio-political impacts of development in the Global South. Sher work examines the politics of development, infrastructure, and state power, with a particular focus on Sri Lanka and South Asia. Her forthcoming book, Central Margins: Sri Lanka’s Violent Frontier (Cambridge University Press, 2026), explores how development projects become instruments of territorial control and state consolidation.

Melani Gunathilaka is a climate activist, researcher and advocate based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She is a researcher at the Law and Society Trust, a research collaborator at the Institute for Political Economy Sri Lanka and co-founder of Climate Action Now Sri Lanka. Her work focuses on sovereign debt, climate justice and development.