By Premakumara de Silva –

As mega-projects in Mannar and Hambantota displace fishermen and trigger elephant conflicts, a stark policy contradiction emerges: Why clear thousands of acres of fragile land when the island’s reservoirs and urban roofs offer a vast, non-displaceable alternative?

Sri Lanka is aggressively chasing a national mandate to generate 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and achieve full power-sector carbon neutrality by 2050. On paper, and within the halls of the UNFCCC where the island’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are registered, this is an ecologically vital triumph. Shaken by a devastating economic crisis that exposed the volatility of imported fossil fuels, the Sri Lanka Sustainable Energy Authority (SLSEA) has rapidly accelerated utility-scale land allocations to private and foreign developers to secure economic sovereignty.

However, joint empirical field research conducted by the research team under the SINTACT project—initially carried out between April 22 and May 16, 2026, and expanded with critical follow-up studies in August 2026 across both the Hambantota and Mannar landscapes—exposes a darker, structural reality. Under the moral imperative of global decarbonization, Sri Lanka is entering a dangerous new frontier of “Green Land Grabbing.” By fast-tracking macro-economic survival strategies, the state frequently bypasses localized Social Impact Assessments (SIAs), converting vital rural Common Pool Resources (CPRs) into corporate real estate, and establishing localized “Green Sacrifice Zones.” In these zones, peripheral rural communities carry the socio-ecological burdens of infrastructure designed to power urban-industrial centers.

An Inter-Governmental Continuity: Scaling Up the Green Zones

This aggressive push towards mega-scale renewable infrastructure is not the work of a single political faction; it represents a deeply entrenched institutional continuity. Initiated under the previous government, the blueprint for rapid utility-scale clean tech concessions was laid out as an emergency exit from foreign exchange shocks. Rather than dismantling this framework, the present government has maintained momentum by actively opening new “Green Energy Zones” across the island’s peripheral dry zones.

Yet, as the contemporary administration inherits the intensifying social friction generated by these land allocations, a critical pivot is underway. Confronted by growing rural resistance and severe ecological spillovers, state planners are actively considering a major policy shift: moving toward floating solar panel systems and distributed grids to directly circumvent terrestrial land-use conflicts. This evolving political dynamic reveals that even at the highest levels of governance, the crisis of land-based green extractivism is becoming impossible to ignore.

The Bureaucratic Sleight of Hand: Weaponizing the “Wasteland”

At the heart of this dispossession is an administrative sleight of hand. Drawing from South Asian critical frameworks established by scholars like Baka (2017) and Yenneti et al. (2016), the Sri Lankan state routinely utilizes bureaucratic language to classify complex dry-zone ecosystems and post-war coastal commons as vacant, barren, or underutilized “wastelands.”

Once labeled as “empty,” these lands are systematically enclosed by fences for wind and solar arrays. This shifts resources from communal, subsistence use into capital-intensive corporate assets, financed by international climate capital markets through the National Climate Finance Strategy (2025–2030) and the Integrated National Financing Framework (INFF). As Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones (2012) popularized, “Green Grabbing” uses the global moral high ground of sustainability to justify expropriating resources, effectively pricing out vulnerable populations from traditional pastures and coastlines.

Ground-Level Realities: Fractured Coastlines and Fenced Migration Paths

The field research phases conducted under the SINTACT project map this structural violence across two highly distinct, fragile geographies:

1. The Mannar Wind Landscape: Enclosing the Post-Conflict Commons

Mannar Island features a complex coastal ecosystem preserved by decades of civil war isolation. Today, high-capacity wind turbines encroach directly upon artisanal nearshore fishing waters and the critical Central Asian Flyway for migratory birds. The resulting environment—disrupted by low-frequency acoustic vibrations and visual flickering—clashes directly with local fisheries co-operatives, actively fracturing post-war livelihood recovery.

2. The Hambantota Solar Landscape: Fueling Wildlife Conflict

In the southern arid agricultural zone, the clearing of over 1,000 acres of forest and scrublands for massive, reflective, fenced photovoltaic solar arrays directly overlaps with the Managed Elephant Range (MER). By replacing hundreds of hectares of scrub jungle with industrial fencing, the project has triggered a severe ecological spillover: it fragments traditional elephant migration paths, forcing wildlife into closer, volatile contact with surrounding villages and intensifying the deadly Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC).

The Policy Alternative: Why Land Clearing is a Choice, Not a Necessity

The ultimate paradox of Sri Lanka’s land-grabbing policy is that terrestrial destruction is entirely avoidable. Densely populated nations are increasingly turning to non-displaceable water and urban-based solutions, and Sri Lanka has already proven their technical viability.

1. The Blue Energy Matrix: Floating and Canal-Top Solar

The country recently connected the 6.5 MW Diyajanani Floating Solar Power Plant on the Ibbankatuwa Reservoir in Dambulla to the national grid, alongside a pilot canal-top solar project along the Viyana Canal in Mahiyanganaya, engineered to generate 5 MW over a 5-kilometer stretch without requiring a single acre of additional land. According to Sri Lanka’s own Renewable Energy Resources Development Plan, the cabinet has acknowledged an estimated 3,000 megawatt potential for floating solar across inland reservoirs. Academic feasibility studies confirm that floatovoltaics operate with 2% to 15% higher energy efficiency due to the natural cooling effect of water while simultaneously reducing reservoir evaporation.

2. Decentralized Rooftop Solar: Democratizing the Grid

Beyond water bodies lies the massive, untapped frontier of decentralized urban rooftop solar panel systems. By converting commercial complexes, factories, and domestic roofs in urban consumption centers into micro-generation hubs, the state could generate power directly where it is consumed. Shifting from massive peripheral terrestrial projects to a highly democratic, community-owned rooftop infrastructure network eliminates costly transmission grid updates, avoids the high expenses of rural land acquisition, and keeps energy production independent of ecologically sensitive wilderness.

Intersectional Shocks: Women, Youth, and the Elderly

The contemporary climate justice literature (such as Esteve-Jordà & Scheidel, 2026; Stock & Gunaratne, 2026) points out that “the community” is not a single, uniform unit. The SINTACT project findings fill a critical gap by providing micro-data on three structurally vulnerable rural demographics:

Demographic Group	Specific Socio-Ecological Impact & Shock
Rural Women	Face elevated physical insecurity and daily hazard due to habitat fragmentation and heightened wildlife encounters (HEC) near villages.
The Elderly	Suffer severe isolation and loss of support as their traditional, resource-dependent structural safety nets are systematically dismantled.
Marginalized Youth	Experience intense economic alienation as common pastures and coastlines vanish, driving widespread distress out-migration.

Expanding the Analytical Horizon

While global literature effectively conceptualizes green grabbing, this Sri Lankan case study addresses critical gaps that contemporary climate justice scholarship argues remain dangerously sparse:

• Post-Conflict Vulnerability: Documenting how green land grabbing interacts with post-conflict recovery in sensitive zones like Mannar Island.

• Ecological Spillover: Overlooking pure economic loss to capture how green enclosures alter wildlife behavior, driving the HEC in Hambantota.

• The FPV-Commons Friction: Investigating how state-corporate structures migrate from land enclosures to water enclosures, noting recent complaints to the Human Rights Commission from freshwater fishermen opposing pilot floating solar structures due to restricted water access.

Conclusion: The Political Asymmetry of Winners and Losers

Ultimately, the empirical findings of the SINTACT project force us to strip away the moral rhetoric of global climate compliance and answer a vital question: Who truly benefits from Sri Lanka’s accelerated green energy transition, and at what cost to rural communities?

The Beneficiaries: Macro-Capital and Urban Centers

The primary beneficiaries form a powerful triad of macro-level interests that operate far above the localized landscapes:

1. International Climate Capital Markets & Foreign Developers:

They reap massive financial returns by absorbing newly commodified common spaces into lucrative global green bond and carbon-offset portfolios.

2. Urban-Industrial Centers:

Metropolitan economic hubs secure a stabilized, emissions-decoupled electricity flow needed to maintain industrial growth.

3. The State Apparatus & National Treasury Managers:

The state gains immediate macro-economic survival buffers, shielding its treasury from global fossil fuel volatility and structural dollar deficits.

The Cost: Peripheral Rural Communities

This macro-survival operates through absolute micro-level extraction. The true currency funding Sri Lanka’s green transition is the systematic dispossession of its peripheral rural citizens.

• The Cost in Mannar:

Paid in the destruction of artisanal nearshore fishing waters, now fractured by low-frequency acoustic vibrations and corporate enclosures that halt post-war economic recovery.

• The Cost in Hambantota:

Paid through the clearing of over 1,000 acres of forest and scrublands, which has weaponized the ecosystem—converting global carbon-mitigation into an immediate, deadly hazard by intensifying the Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC).

• The Demographic Shock:

Traditional Common Pool Resources (CPRs)—the historic safety nets for women, youth, and the elderly—are violently transformed into premium carbon-mitigation real estate, pricing out the most vulnerable and driving distress out-migration.

The rapid acquisition of terrestrial ecosystems in Hambantota and en masse coastal corridors in Mannar is not a technical necessity; it is a targeted political choice. Viable technological alternatives—ranging from distributed urban rooftop solar networks to localized reservoir-based floatovoltaics—prove that clean energy can be generated without human displacement or habitat fragmentation. By prioritizing corporate clean-tech enclosures over decentralized, community-owned energy grids, the state exposes the true priority of the current framework: it is less about ecological preservation and more about capital accumulation via geographic enclosure. If Sri Lanka continues to alienate its post-conflict and dry-zone communities for macro-capital gains, its green energy transition will simply remain a localized manifestation of green extractivism, powered by the displacement of its most vulnerable citizens.

*Premakumara de Silva, Professor, Department of Sociology – University of Colombo