Photo courtesy of Lahiru Walpita
Sri Lanka stands at a critical juncture. Emerging from economic turmoil and the long shadow of civil war, the country now confronts an arguably more insidious struggle: the negotiation of its environmental destiny. Governments and corporations alike hail wind farms, solar parks and carbon sequestration projects as the panacea for energy shortfalls and climate vulnerability. Yet beneath the slogans of sustainability lies a fraught terrain where foreign investors, multilateral lenders and domestic power brokers vie to define what green means and who reaps its rewards. Can Sri Lanka’s pivot to renewables truly foster ecological resilience and social justice or will it merely repurpose colonial patterns of extraction and dispossession under an eco-friendly veneer? This article traces the contours of climate colonialism in the Indian Ocean, examining how large scale green deals risk reproducing dependency even as they promise autonomy. From turbines on war-scarred lands to carbon offsets in ancestral forests, from data driven monitoring to maritime blue carbon schemes, the green transition reveals itself as a contested, multi-scalar project, demanding both critical vigilance and a recalibration of sovereignty.
Green investments in a post crisis landscape
In the aftermath of the 2022 sovereign debt crisis, Sri Lanka’s turn to international financiers marked a rupture in fiscal policy and a deepening entanglement with external actors. The IMF’s rescue package, draped in conditionality, underscored the urgency of structural reforms and balance of payments stabilization. Renewable energy quickly emerged as a centerpiece of the government’s reform agenda. High profile agreements such as the Adani Group’s wind project across former no fire zones in the North and a Chinese-backed solar corridor at Hambantota attest to the geopolitical stakes of green infrastructure. On one hand, these deals promise decreased fossil fuel imports, cleaner air and fiscal dividends. On the other, they embed foreign corporations in critical national infrastructure, often negotiated through opaque executive channels rather than transparent public processes. Local war-affected communities, still grappling with displacement and militarization, find their lands earmarked for turbines and panels yet their voices scarcely inform project design. Through the lens of energy sovereignty, Sri Lanka’s renewable investments reveal a paradox: they reduce one form of dependence even as they erect new chains of obligation.
Conservation and carbon offsets
While renewables capture headlines, conservation linked carbon offset schemes have quietly expanded across the Eastern and Central Provinces. Funded by European pension funds and administered through international intermediaries, these projects convert tens of thousands of hectares into carbon sinks, promising lucrative credits on global markets. Yet the fast tracked Environmental Impact Assessments and perfunctory consultations belie the scale of dispossession. Indigenous vedda communities and Tamil peasant families report losing access to non-timber forest products, sacred groves and grazing lands once integral to their subsistence. In villages outside Batticaloa, elderly farmers lament that they were branded as illegal squatters, compelled to sign away land rights for one time compensation packages that vanish once the carbon traders claim their offsets. This dynamic mirrors patterns in the Amazon and Southeast Asia but it carries a distinct Sri Lankan inflection: lands once contested in the crucible of war are rebranded as environmental assets, displacing inhabitants a second time under an ecologically righteous mandate. The result is not a reconciliation of human and ecological needs but the elevation of carbon markets over customary stewardship.
The militarization of green governance
The military retains significant economic clout in the post-war era, managing entities from agriculture estates to real estate ventures. The expansion of green projects into formerly contested zones has often passed through military channels. Coastal solar arrays in Trincomalee, overseen by naval authorities, restrict artisanal fishing grounds without accommodating traditional fishing schedules. Army controlled development agencies co-manage mangrove restoration under blue carbon programs even as local custodians whose ancestral knowledge is vital to coastal ecology are excluded from decision making. Legal frameworks meant to safeguard public lands are bypassed through defense ministry directives while environmental activists and community advocates face surveillance or intimidation under broad national security statutes. What emerges is a peculiar inversion of conflict transformation: war time institutions repurposed as stewards of peace and sustainability yet operating without democratic oversight. This greenwashing of occupation underscores the need to disentangle environmental governance from martial prerogatives.
Data, surveillance and the invisible front of climate control
As physical installations multiply, an equally pervasive infrastructure of data and surveillance takes shape. International agencies and private tech firms deploy drones, satellite sensors and cloud platforms to monitor forest health, optimize turbine output and verify carbon flux. Ostensibly, these tools enhance transparency; in reality, they channel control to distant command centers and corporate servers. In the Eastern Province, villagers recall the arrival of GPS enabled drones that catalog canopy density and biodiversity metrics without local oversight. Agreements signed under technical jargon grant foreign investors co-ownership of all environmental data, constraining Sri Lanka’s ability to leverage information for its own policymaking. The same networks that track tree growth could surveil community gatherings or alert officials to unsanctioned land use activities. Thus, the invisible architecture of the green transition becomes another mechanism of remote governance where algorithms and servers rather than elected bodies adjudicate land and resource management.
Maritime dimensions and the blue carbon imperative
Sri Lanka’s identity is inseparable from its maritime frontier where seagrass meadows, coral reefs and mangrove stands function as vital carbon reservoirs. The rise of blue carbon discourse has prompted proposals for underwater carbon measurement, seagrass restoration and even explorations of deep sea carbon sequestration. Yet these initiatives, too, risk reinscribing colonial enclosures at sea. Coastal fishing communities lament the designation of no take zones to map seagrass biomass, often established without consulting local councils that historically governed marine commons. Experimental coral transplantation sites disrupt ancestral canoe routes, impeding traditional livelihoods while generating little local buy in. Meanwhile, high level memoranda among foreign universities, shipping corporations and the government outline piloting of subsea carbon storage trials with minimal parliamentary scrutiny. Such schemes threaten to convert the ocean – once a source of sustenance and cultural identity – into another frontier of extractive experimentation where the promise of resilience overshadows communal rights and ecological complexity.
Historical continuities
The parallels between 19th century plantation economies and 21st century green investments are striking. Under British rule, vast swathes of forest were cleared for coffee, tea, rubber and coconut estates, integrating the island into global commodity chains and undermining local food systems. Post-independence elites inherited these plantation frameworks, repurposing them for state led development. Today’s wind farms and carbon offsets simply repopulate those patterns with new crops – turbines and carbon credits. Colonial cadastral maps remain the legal basis for land registration, privileging state or corporate claims over customary tenure. Forest reserves conceived under colonial wildlife acts serve as models for modern conservation zones that displace rather than empower forest dwelling communities. By tracing these continuities, one can see that climate colonialism is not an aberration but an echo of centuries-old land governance regimes. Breaking this cycle requires remapping land rights to center communal stewardship and dismantling legal legacies that enshrine extractive property norms.
Community led alternatives
Despite these formidable pressures, communities across Sri Lanka are cultivating alternative pathways to climate resilience. In villages around Batticaloa, smallholder cooperatives financed by Tamil diaspora micro grants have installed rooftop solar arrays whose output is shared among neighbors, reducing dependence on the national grid and fostering collective ownership. Women’s mangrove collectives in Jaffna negotiate directly with NGOs to restore coastal forests using traditional seed planting methods, ensuring that land titles remain in community hands. Central highlands smallholders have formed organic tea alliances that bypass large estates, marketing directly to fair trade buyers in Europe. These grassroots endeavors exemplify reparative climate justice, knitting together ecological regeneration with social empowerment. They demonstrate that sustainability transitions grounded in local knowledge and communal governance can outshine top down, investment driven models.
Transnational solidarity and the politics of justice
Sri Lanka’s struggles resonate with other small island developing states and Global South communities facing analogous challenges. Fisherfolk in the Pacific collaborate with Sri Lankan coastal activists through shared platforms at UN climate fora, advocating for binding Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) standards. Carnival of Solidarities networks link youth engineers from Sri Lanka with counterparts in Southeast Asia to co-design open source microgrid technologies. These transnational alliances challenge the architecture of climate finance, calling for debt for nature swaps that convert external obligations into grants supporting community led green infrastructure. By forging coalitions that transcend national borders, affected communities amplify their bargaining power against both multinational investors and unilateral donor agendas, reshaping climate governance toward rights-based frameworks.
Sri Lanka’s journey toward a green future unfolds in the interstices of promise and peril. Wind turbines and solar parks can indeed offer relief from fossil fuel volatility and reduce carbon footprints. Yet if they are orchestrated through opaque deals, enforced by martial authority and measured by distant algorithms, they risk replicating the colonial and wartime legacies of dispossession. True conflict transformation and climate justice must weave ecological sustainability into the fabric of democratic governance and reparative rights. They must center the voices of those whose lives are entwined with land, sea, and forest: the fisherwomen who track tides by memory, the youth engineers who dream of microgrids under communal control and the vedda elders who sing the land into being. Only by reimagining sovereignty as shared stewardship of land, water, data and heritage can Sri Lanka transcend the green mirage and claim a future that is not only sustainable but also just. In that unfolding story, the country’s most vulnerable inhabitants will not be passive recipients of external charity but authors of a climate transition rooted in equity, memory and the transformative power of collective hope.