Land, Body and Consent: Women and the Climate of Extraction in Mannar

Photo courtesy of Melani Gunathilaka 

In Konniyan Kudiyirippu, women’s lives are written in palmyrah and soil. A wind farm arrived without their consent, flooded their land and poisoned their water. Now a mining company is quietly circling the same village.

Vashingtina is 32 years old, a kindergarten teacher, a mother of two daughters and has lived in Konniyan Kudiyirippu for nearly 20 years, long enough to know when the palmyrah is ready, what the soil needs and which way the water moves after rain.

This small coastal village sits on the southern edge of Mannar island, parts of which lie at or below sea level, making it among the most climate vulnerable areas in Sri Lanka. Exposed to sea level rise, intensifying monsoons and the salinisation of soils and groundwater, its communities depend on a land based economy built over generations. The women who live here hold an intimate knowledge of the place, its soils, its seasonal rhythms, its waterways and its yields. The kind of knowledge that accumulates through daily, embodied labour with a specific landscape over many years. It does not appear in technical reports. It is not the kind that gets a seat at the table when development decisions are made.

The village economy, as Vashingtina describes it, was built entirely from what the land and sea offered. Men fished the waters around Mannar island. Women were at the centre of the land economy, turning its natural abundance into income without a factory, a formal employer or a supply chain managed by someone else. They harvested kottakilangu and moringa, wove palmyrah products, cultivated vegetable gardens and kept goats, chickens and cattle. “We use everything from the nature to earn an income,” she said.

What this economy did not receive was fair return. A single palmyrah bag takes three days to make. Raw materials must be bought by the producer. The finished bag sells for Rs 200. That price is a loss. While the value leaves the village, the labour stays behind in women’s bodies.

When a development project is proposed on land where communities live and work, those communities have the right to free, prior and informed consent. Free means without coercion. Prior means before decisions are made. Informed means communities receive full, accessible information about what is being built and what it might take from them. Consent means genuine agreement, not silence, and not a signature collected during food ration distribution.

This right is grounded in international human rights law and embedded in the safeguard policies of multilateral lenders including the Asian Development Bank (ADB). According to ADB project documentation, a loan of $ 200 million was approved for the Ceylon Electricity Board in October 2017 to finance the Thambapavani Wind Farm, Sri Lanka’s first large scale wind energy project, inaugurated in December 2020. Sri Lanka’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions is negligible. The communities of Mannar island are living with the consequences of a climate crisis produced overwhelmingly by industrialised nations. This is the loss and damage argument at its most concrete. The people least responsible for the crisis bearing its heaviest costs while the systems designed to address it are built on their land, without their consent, in the name of a green transition that serves decarbonisation targets they did not set. The frameworks that justified this project obligated its architects to protect exactly what it destroyed. Communities are not pushed off their land at once. They are worn out of it, slowly, as the land itself is made uninhabitable.

Two meetings were held in Konniyan Kudiyirippu before construction began. Vashingtina attended them. She is listed by name in the Environmental Impact Assessment prepared for this project. She does not deny attending. Her presence is documented. Her consent is not. What she disputes is what her presence is being made to mean. Being present at a meeting is not consent. Being recorded as a participant is not consent. Consent is a specific act of informed agreement, freely given, with the genuine power to say no and have that answer change the outcome.

The consultations took different forms. Some were small group discussions of two, three and five people. Others were larger village meetings. What they shared was not scale but structure. Communities were presented with a project decision already in motion, asked for their views and overruled. The women’s consultation of February 2017 held at the church in Konniyan Kudiyirippu records their concerns about noise, fishing and health. What it also records, without apparent recognition of its significance, is this; one woman said the final decision was in her husband’s hands. It is documented evidence that the consultation was held in a community where women’s ability to give or withhold consent was itself structurally constrained. The process did not address this. It recorded it and proceeded. “When we said no, they told us this is a government project so it cannot be stopped. They spoke to everyone together. When people spoke, it was mostly men who spoke,” the woman said.

In a community where decision making spaces have historically been shaped by caste hierarchies and gendered norms, a general meeting is not a neutral space. For women to be present is not the same as for women to be heard.

Then came the signatures. A third party organisation working alongside the Grama Niladhari office distributed food rations to families in the village. Signatures and national identity card numbers were collected in the process. Years later, those signatures appeared as documentation of community consent for the Thambapavani Wind Farm. Vashingtina had participated in the consultation meetings. She had also signed for food rations. These were two entirely different acts. Only one of them was consent to the project and it was not the signature. “Our village has a lot of poor people. Officials sometimes brings rice, flour and food and distributes to people. And they take signatures when the rations are handed out. We gave our signatures when the food rations were given to us. Now they are showing those signatures as our consent to the wind power project. We only learned about it three years after,” Vashingtina pointed out.

This account is corroborated by documentation compiled by Fr. S. Marcus of the Mannar Citizens Committee, who lists manipulated signatures as one of 10 critical failures of the project’s implementation. The EIA was produced by the Ceylon Electricity Board, the borrower, for the ADB, the lender. The assessment of harm was produced by those with a financial interest in minimising it. Right to Information requests to local and national authorities seeking consultation records yielded no information from any institution except one acknowledgement of receipt. Safeguard policies are designed primarily to satisfy institutional lenders, not to transfer genuine decision making power to affected communities.

When the wind farm was presented to the communities of Mannar, it came with promises. Jobs would be created. Lives would improve. When construction began, the work that materialised was security roles and manual labour for some men. For women, there was nothing. The road the company used to transport its turbines through Konniyan Kudiyirippu had been broken long before the wind farm came. When the community requested help repairing it, they were told no.

Communities are invoked when something is needed from them – their land, their signatures and their roads – and set aside when resources are distributed. Development arrives as a promise and leaves as an extraction.

A second form of extraction is now being prepared. Titanium Sands Ltd, an Australian company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, holds exploration licences focused specifically around Konniyan Kudiyirippu and the adjacent village of Thoddaveli. Its licences were acquired through Mauritian shell companies, cancelled by the Geological Survey and Mines Bureau in April 2021, reissued by December 2021 and are now subject to a Supreme Court freeze the company continues to work around. The palmyrah trees, the soil women have farmed for generations and the groundwater that feeds the wells all sit above mineral deposits the company intends to extract by drilling up to 12 metres below the surface. A building bearing the Titanium Sands Ltd board stands near the road leading into Konniyan Kudiyirippu. The women who pass it daily were not told what it represents.

A year after the wind farm’s construction began, the rains came and Konniyan Kudiyirippu flooded. At first, Vashingtina thought it was simply the weather. “We thought we got flooded because the rains were heavy. We didn’t think the fan up there caused it,” she said.

The Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) prepared for this project recorded that flooding was already a reality in the village. That knowledge was documented. It was not acted on. Konniyan Kudiyirippu sits at or below sea level. This is confirmed by Dr. Nagamuthu Piratheeparajah, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Jaffna. When the wind farm’s infrastructure was built, the natural waterways that carried rainwater from the village to the sea were disrupted. “They checked the geography and kept the culvert but didn’t keep it in the right place. Because of that all the water got stuck and our village got flooded,” Vashingtina said.

The flooding that followed became an annual reality. In the worst years, floodwater remained from December through May. Even in years when it receded sooner, the damage to wells, soil and harvests accumulated season after season. “Every year after the wind power project we experienced flooding. We try to raise our heads a little but when the flooding happens, we lose our business again,” Vashingtina said.

The wells became contaminated as sewage mixed with groundwater. The moringa stopped growing. Seeds, animals, vegetable gardens and the palmyrah harvest were all lost during flood months. Families now buy water at Rs 5 per litre. But they don’t have a way to verify that it’s filtered water.

Mahaluxmy Nagasundaram of the Mannar Women’s Development Federation confirms that turbine shadows on the sea and damage to fish larvae channels have reduced fish catches, compounding losses on land with losses at sea.

When the floods come, the men leave for daily wage work. The women stay. They cook in flooded kitchens, keep children home from school, stay awake through the night watching water levels and manage the entire reproductive labour of the household without clean water or functioning sanitation. This is unpaid care work, entirely absent from any cost-benefit analysis conducted for this project. Women in Konniyan Kudiyirippu are already performing informal climate adaptation, sourcing water, protecting children and maintaining food security without recognition, compensation or inclusion in any formal adaptation plan.

Mahaluxmy describes what flooding means for the most vulnerable women in the community. Pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers unable to access functioning sanitation. Floodwater mixed with sewage cause scabies and skin disease. Home gardens are destroyed. “When water levels rise, we can’t use toilets. Floodwater is everywhere. Where are we going to do the things that women have to do to keep our health and sanitation?” she asked.

The shame attached to women’s bodies means sanitation, menstrual hygiene and reproductive health sit below drinking water in the hierarchy of what gets addressed when flooding strikes. The flood produced not only a water crisis but a crisis of dignity, one that falls mostly on women and remains almost entirely unacknowledged.

The domination of nature and the marginalisation of women are not separate phenomena that happen to resemble each other. They are the same system. Extra activism requires both. It requires the land to be treated as a resource with no intrinsic value beyond what can be taken from it. It requires women, particularly women in communities like Konniyan Kudiyirippu, to perform the reproductive, subsistence and care labour that makes extraction possible, absorbing its consequences in their bodies and their daily lives without compensation, recognition or power. The land’s drainage was disrupted by infrastructure placed without knowledge of the land. Women’s bodies bear the overflow of that disruption. Neither the land’s distress nor women’s suffering appears in any project ledger. They were treated from the beginning as consequences that someone else would absorb. These are costs that exist in the bodies and daily lives of women who were never asked to bear them and never given a choice.

Vashingtina has not stopped thinking about what comes next. Even in the middle of describing everything that has been taken, she is already building something in her mind with the same precision she once applied to the land.

At home, she produces flour, processes kottakilangu and makes health mixes from palmyrah and other natural ingredients. The knowledge is hers. The labour is hers. The products are real. What is missing is not capability. What is missing is shared infrastructure, a collective workspace and a market that reflects the true value of what she makes. “If we make things and there is a place to store them in an orderly manner, if these facilities can be provided, I can create an income source for me and four other women,” she said.

Her vision is to scale what she has already built from individual household labour into a community enterprise. A shared building with electricity, washrooms and storage where small groups of women can work together and each earn a fair return. For water, she proposes the same logic. A community owned purification machine, maintained through a small fee, governed by the community itself. “Now if we are buying at five rupees, we can charge a fee of two rupees to repair the filter machine if necessary,” she said.

This is commons governance. Communities collectively owning and managing shared resources, setting their own rules, retaining decision making power over what sustains them. That she had to arrive at it alone is a testimony to how deeply these solutions are rooted in the land and in the community. That they exist without institutional recognition is an indictment of the systems that should have supported them.

The systematic assignment of lesser worth to women, to communities in the Global South and to the ecological knowledge they hold operates at every scale. In the household, women’s labour is unpaid and their sanitation needs are negotiated rather than assumed. At the national level, development decisions are made without meaningful community input. In global environmental governance, the women of Konniyan Kudiyirippu have no seat, no voice and no standing in the negotiations that determine their future. Their losses do not appear in climate finance calculations. Their knowledge does not inform adaptation plans. Their consent is not required for projects built in the name of a green transition that serves decarbonisation targets set by the countries most responsible for the crisis they are living.

Mahaluxmy puts it simply. “Every citizen desires development that allows people to live and exist happily within their environment.” Not megawatts. Not mineral extraction. Just the ability to live within the environment that sustains you with the knowledge and agency to shape what happens to it.

Vashingtina wants a marketplace without middlemen, fair pricing, a repaired road, clean water and a workspace where small groups of women can build something together. She wants environmental education alongside gender rights training because she understands they are inseparable. She wants women to run for office and win because the boundary between who makes decisions and who absorbs their consequences is not natural. It is political. And it can be changed.

The women of Konniyan Kudiyirippu hold decades of accumulated, place-based knowledge of the land, water and ecosystems they live within. Their claim to shape decisions about their environment is not only a claim of knowledge. It is a claim of stake, of rights and of belonging. That claim was not consulted when the wind farm was approved. It is not consulted when mining licences are issued. That exclusion is a political choice, made repeatedly, by systems that were never designed to ask them.

On August 13, 2025, the president made a promise to the people of Mannar island. No further development would proceed without the consent of local communities. The 10 turbine wind project that followed was constructed in Mullikulam on the adjacent mainland, a distinction the communities of Mannar have been questioning ever since. In September 2025, hundreds of residents protested at the Presidential Secretariat in Colombo. That same month, peaceful protesters were attacked by armed police officers including Special Task Force members. Women were among those injured. In January 2026, residents wrote to the president directly, noting that his assurance had been disregarded and that continued development was deepening the marginalisation of Tamil communities in the north.

The next wind project in the Mannar area, the 50 MW Hayleys Fentons development, lists among its community benefits safe drinking water supply, new water channels and canal dredging to mitigate flooding. The flooding and water contamination that make these interventions necessary were caused by the first wind project. The remedy for one project’s harm is being marketed as a gift from the next.

Sri Lanka’s target of 70% renewable energy generation by 2030 places Mannar at the centre of national energy planning. Thambapavani is not a peripheral project. It is the first implementation of that commitment. But the same government submitted its third Nationally Determined Contribution in September 2025 committing to just transition and gender equality and social inclusion responsive climate action. Sri Lanka has signed a document that simultaneously drives wind development in Mannar and obligates gender responsive, socially inclusive implementation. Konniyan Kudiyirippu is the evidence that only one of those commitments has been honoured. The gap between them is a political failure paid for entirely by the communities who had no say in either the commitments or the decisions.

A just energy transition requires that the people most exposed to climate change shape the responses to it, that women’s ecological knowledge is treated as essential input, that women’s unpaid care labour is considered in project evaluations, that women’s health including reproductive health is a non-negotiable indicator of project harm and that consent processes actively dismantle structural barriers to women’s participation rather than performing inclusion while reproducing exclusion.

A women’s lens is not a gender add on to development planning. Women’s lived realities, their knowledge of the land, their unpaid labour and their bodies bearing harm that never appears in any ledger are the most accurate available measure of whether development is working, for whom and at what cost. Systems built without them are designed, through omission, to serve someone else. Until women’s lived realities are treated as the foundation of climate solutions rather than a footnote to them, the harm will continue to be invisible. And it will continue to be borne by the same people.

The land of Konniyan Kudiyirippu is still flooding. The wells are still contaminated. The soil has not recovered. Vashingtina is still here, still producing, still teaching and still imagining what this village could become. She is a mother to daughters who will inherit whatever is left of this land. The question of what they inherit is still being decided in offices and boardrooms and project documents by people who have not asked her. That is not inevitable. It is a choice. And it can be unmade.

Author’s Note: Right to Information requests were submitted on September 23, 2025 to the Divisional Secretariat Mannar, the Sri Lanka Sustainable Energy Authority, the Ceylon Electricity Board and the Central Environmental Authority. Three institutions did not respond. The Central Environmental Authority acknowledged receipt but provided no information. The Environmental Impact Assessment for the Thambapavani Wind Farm (ADB project 49345-002, prepared by the Ceylon Electricity Board, May 2017) is publicly accessible on the ADB website. Titanium Sands Ltd quarterly reports are publicly accessible on the Australian Securities Exchange.