By Eric Hirsch, Associate Professor, Franklin & Marshall College
Readers of this post are likely to be familiar with the Maldives’ recent history of climate advocacy. In 2009, Maldivian president Mohamed Nasheed burst onto the world stage with a media stunt dramatizing the impending threat of sea-level rise. He hosted an underwater cabinet meeting where he and his ministers, covered in SCUBA gear, sat at desks arrayed on the floor of a lagoon. They used hand signals to approve a proclamation declaring the unique urgency of global fossil fuel reduction for the Maldives’ survival. Should the world fail to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, the ministers claimed, the Maldives could soon be submerged by rising seas. Staged in coordination with US environmentalist Bill McKibben’s organization 350.org, the meeting became a viral news story that promised to create momentum ahead of the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference. That year’s negotiation ultimately proved disappointing for the Maldives. But the Nasheed-led advocacy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, including his own vow to turn the Maldives carbon-neutral by 2020, placed the country firmly on the global map of visible climate-vulnerable nations.
The Maldives became well known as a low-lying atoll nation with its highest natural point a mere 2.5 meters above sea level—which made it a perfect synecdoche of sea-level rise and “sinking” nations (Hirsch 2015). Maldivian environmentalists and scientific advocates echoed Nasheed in publicizing the threat of rising seas along with that of coral bleaching and water shortages. Western media outlets began narrating the country’s struggles through a “paradise lost” lens (Bryant 2004; Crossan 2025), a common framing for small island nations (Farbotko 2010).
Given their plea for the world to think of the country’s survival before burning more fossil fuels, it may be surprising to learn how excited many Maldivian leaders are about new airports. Airports have been proliferating throughout the Maldives in recent decades, particularly in the sixteen years since Nasheed’s cabinet meeting when the country had only five airports. The Maldives now has nineteen and counting, five of them offering international flights, which serve a population of 515,000. This is a high national airport density based both on size and population. The Maldives’ surface land area totals about 300 km2 (approximately the size of the US city of Charleston, South Carolina) and its exclusive economic zone (which encompasses both its land and ocean area) spanning about 90,000 km2 (roughly the size of the US state of Maine). The country now rivals the US in airports per capita1. To be sure, a high number of airports is not unusual for many countries in the 2020s. Airports have been expanding in number globally, with hundreds of new ones under construction, especially in South Asia and East Asia. However, aside from the Velana International Airport in Malé, the Maldivian capital where about one-third of the country’s population is concentrated, these airports serve relatively few people. They have not replaced the country’s robust inter-island ferry transportation system, which is significantly more affordable than air travel.
The Maldives’ climate advocacy, its internal concern about the impacts of fossil fuel emissions, its ongoing commitment to global mitigation targets despite the many changes in government since Nasheed’s administration, and its deep history of long-distance seafaring and ocean mobility therefore make the country’s many airports a jarring sight (see map below).
Several of these airports are quite close to one another. Some do not serve many flights. Citizens are raising concern about whether airports represent the best use of limited government funds. Air travel, of course, is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (Ritchie 2024). The installation of cement-intensive infrastructure is also emissions-intensive (Elinoff 2019) and can snuff out carbon sinks.
No infrastructural project promises economic growth, connectivity, and possibility quite like an airport. If infrastructures are always also messaging devices (Larkin 2013), airports communicate that the place where they are situated matters economically. That people have important business there. That people from there have important business elsewhere. Airports index participation and legitimacy in a prosperous broader world. They signify, perform, configure, and enact economic growth.
Packed with promise, airports serve as a powerful political device in the Maldives. As with big infrastructure proposals that secure political goodwill all over the world (Zhang 2022), regional airports can make potent campaign promises. In the rest of this post, I describe how one promised airport came to fruition—if just barely— on the island of Kulhudhuffushi during the Maldives’ 2018 presidential campaign. The project’s rapidity exemplifies a broader global trend toward authoritarian mastery over recalcitrant environments and democratic processes pitched as avoiding red tape or pulling one over on the so-called “deep state.” The conflict over this politically performative airport also highlights the role of what Christopher Neubert calls “intimate geopolitics” (2020, 43) in the use of strongman tactics to shore up images of a productive and growing nation-state. For the incumbent president, Abdulla Yameen, a new airport project represented not only the kept promise of a thriving and growing Maldives that could solidify his case for reelection, but also, a masculine muscular claim by a strong leader over the feminized terrain of a wetland. Layered upon this often-explicit gendered opposition (see Ortner 1974), the fabricated electoral urgency of the otherwise unnecessary airport also suggests a political move whereby economic growth becomes a kind of climate change adaptation, a means of pushing back against vulnerability by way of (masculinized) human mastery over (feminized) nature.
For environmental activist Humay Abdulghafoor, airports exemplify the gap between the Maldives’ international advocacy for small islands acutely exposed to climate change impacts and its short-sighted leaders’ dismissal of watery environments as disposable in the name of economic expansion. We met for coffee on a foggy June morning at the Sea House Café, a restaurant perched above the Malé city ferry station with views of massive container ships lumbering through the harbor and the much smaller ferries shuttling between the metro area’s islands. The middle-aged Humay co-hosts an influential blog called Dhivehi Sitee, which comments on public affairs and often points out the hypocrisy and corruption that underlie infrastructural megaprojects. She wields wordplay as a weapon of unsparing critique in her writing; in conversation, it is delivered with clipped delight. For example, she told me that the Maldivian Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is “a misnomer” because it did not, in fact, have “agency.”
One of Abdulghafoor’s current arenas of advocacy is the #SaveMaldives campaign and non-governmental organization. It began in 2017 with the groundbreaking of the Kulhudhuffushi island airport, which would serve only a single airline, Maldivian, mostly with flights to the capital. Named for its mangroves, the island is in one of the northernmost atolls of the Maldives. It has a population of about 10,000 people. One of its key features was a wetland where women processed the ropes they would weave from coconut fronds. These ropes are widely used on Maldivian fishing boats. According to weaver testimonies, their work fit into a kind of gendered economic complementarity, where women would traditionally weave the ropes that fishermen would then use out on the open ocean. This is, as Abdulghafoor indicated, “highly skilled work” that had been passed down “for generations” which “supplemented their other income, you know, the ‘man’s income,’ if you like.”
Through her writing and advocacy for this erased economic activity, Abdulghafoor drew awareness to the ecological and economic recklessness of the project. The new airport site was just 11 miles from the better-established Hanimaadhoo Airport, inaugurated in 1986, which offers regular service to and from the capital and was upgraded to an International Airport in 2012 after it began offering flights to Thiruvananthapuram, India. Despite their proximity, then-president Abdulla Yameen, half-brother of former longtime president Maumoon Gayoom (in office from 1978 to 2008) and his successor in leading the Progressive Party of Maldives, had promised an airport on Kulhudhuffushi in an attempt to persuade voters with spectacular infrastructure.
Yameen made the case for the airport in a rally there in 2017, as covered by the now-defunct Maldives Independent. Noting that airports were the “backbone of all economic work,” he framed traditional weaving as the labor of a premodern society that must be discarded to make way for the future prosperity that connectivity and tourism promised: “I’m not talking about traditions and good customs. But the things we do to move forward, to develop industries, to bring development to youth and the people, do we always have to soak coconut husks? Why must we always soak coconut husks?” He suggested letting the island’s young people make what he presented as an obvious choice: “Would you rather have the opportunity to earn more from tourism or would you rather beat coconut husks till your eyesight is all but gone?” His speech promised an operational airport by the following year, when the reelection campaign would be in full swing.
He kept his promise. Technically. Abdulghafoor recounted the airport’s 2018 opening as an utter debacle:
There was no terminal, there was no fire and rescue, there was no ground handling, there was no nothing. He just went on a test flight and did his speech in the pouring rain because there was no terminal. But this is the level of sacrifice he was willing to make to get this done and tick this box to say, “Okay, now you have an airport.” Doesn’t matter if they could use it or not. There’s the airport, you know. Here’s the picture. That is the level of political delivery, of promises here.
Yameen’s test flight enacted the performance of a promise made and kept by a president who builds things. Infrastructural development has taken a specific large-scale, masculine flavor when the more authoritarian-leaning parties within Maldivian politics, like Yameen’s, have had power (although faith in infrastructure crosses party lines; see Gray 2023). Yameen’s airport demonstrates that economic growth is a composition that needs to be staged, a finding I have also gleaned from other ethnographic contexts (Hirsch 2022). In this case, growth was staged by destroying an essential component of the island ecosystem and declaring victory. The Maldivian Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did not initially approve the airport project, given the environmental harm of paving over Kulhudhuffushi’s wetlands, which Abdulghafoor described:
The wetland is part of its defense system, the island’s own defense system, which has obviously evolved over time to be what it is, because it’s the drainage system of the island. And I think the wetlands here are slightly different to elsewhere because we don’t have huge land masses. So what we’ve learned since is that the mangrove and wetland is a huge carbon sink and also the drainage system, and the recharge, the groundwater recharge system of the island, and this is what they destroyed. Plus, with the airport, they destroyed the eastern [tsunami-prone] side of the island which should never be touched…The island’s natural defenses are pretty good. And man hadn’t done it. But the men of today think that they can do better than what nature has done and has continued to keep us above water all of these years, you know all these thousands and millions of years probably. And this is what they want to improve on.
Thoriq Ibrahim, Minister of the Environment at the time (and once again as of November 2023), overruled the EPA’s decision. “This was in the run-up to the COP in Bonn. I can’t remember the number now, which COP it is, there’s been so many,” Abdulghafoor told me. The Minister “flew off to the COP around the same week that he signed off to build this airport.” Still, the airport was not constructed without resistance. Non-governmental groups publicized the destructive move. Demonstrators assembled in protest of the airport. They were dispersed by police “special ops.”
In Bonn, the minister promised that the dispossessed weavers would be taken care of in some way, but this promise was not kept. For Minister Ibrahim, climate change did not contradict land expansion for an airport. It made projects like the airport more urgent, as economic growth and ecological survival were tactically massaged into a single adaptive posture. “What Kulhudhuffushi really needed was a hospital,” Abdulghafoor noted. She suggested that less destructive alternatives existed but were not entertained. Instead of an airport, ferry connectivity could have been improved to create a short route from Kulhuduffushi to the nearby Hanimaadhoo airport. The Maldives also has a strong tradition of seaplane piloting. Small seaplanes could have been used as public transportation without the need for airport infrastructure, but currently, these planes exclusively serve tourist-only resort islands.
The women weavers were excluded from the all-male consultation meetings with local and national governments and with the EPA. Women’s work was invisibilized in the face of infrastructure installation, even though it could often be the main source of household income. The Maldivian women’s advocacy group Uthema put together several short web documentaries about the island’s weavers and the economic lives that the airport project would destabilize. One video (Uthema 2020a) features a weaver named Asiyath Hussain who describes learning the practice from her grandmother as a child. This work has long been associated with the Kulhudhuffushi wetland which was essential for softening the material. “People of the island criticized the plans a lot,” Hussain says, “saying that the airport could have been built somewhere else on the island too.” However, the all-male island council did not stop the project or ask to move it. Yameen’s electoral urgency meant a rushed project that blindsided the weavers. Hussain describes emergency efforts to rescue as many husks as possible.
I lost coconut husks worth five months of work, when they took the pits. The state did not compensate anyone who lost their pits. I think the state should compensate us, right? People were very sad about it. Some even cried. There were people whose livelihoods depended entirely on this work…I make very thin coir rope now, that can be used as keychains. I’ve given up on making thicker rope now that we have lost our pits.
A second, shorter video, also produced by Uthema (2020b), presents the devastation to Kulhudhuffushi’s weaving economy by the numbers. Their inventory: 1806 husk pits. 4848 bundles of coir rope. 404 families affected. 8.7 million rufiyaah (the equivalent of $564,290, or $4.5 million PPP adjusted). All destroyed, for an airport that serves one flight per day. As of 2023, one indefinite consequence of the Kulhudhuffushi airport project is the obligation of continual shore maintenance in the face of exacerbated erosion to the tune of $1.4 million and counting (Abdulghafoor 2023).
Abdulla Yameen’s 2018 campaign for reelection failed. So did his attempt at a 2023 comeback. The winning candidate in 2018 was Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, who came from Nasheed’s more environmentally friendly political party. Yet Yameen’s infrastructures persist, a near-permanent statement of his fleeting enactment of power and his electoral scrambling, a scar of the harm of a male-only decision ending a women’s economy with the sudden concrete flattening of Kulhuduffushi’s feminized mangrove ecosystem. The Kulhuduffushi airport project reveals the way climate change serves as a national framework for broad concerns about vulnerability and global obligation while any specific carbon sink remains up for grabs by the growth imperative. The futures set into motion by infrastructures that enact human mastery, and that enact environments as terrae nullius for economic growth (Voyles 2017), transcend any single actor’s power or purpose. The manufactured urgency with which the wetland was drained, hardened, and paved over for the airport was also suggestive of faith in the vague promise of tourism that, for most islands that are not designated as private resorts, never seems to bear specific fruit.
Left in the wake of this barely used airport is the underside of infrastructure’s promises and permissions: a future foreclosed by asphalt and concrete with shocking speed. As Abdulghafoor eloquently suggests (2022), this accumulation of massive airport projects and other human attempts at expanding and altering Maldivian land in the name of growth-ready infrastructural modernization amounts to a “great deformation” of the national living space. Tlingit anthropologist Anne Spice develops a critique of the notion of “critical infrastructures” from the standpoint of Unist’ot’en Indigenous anti-pipeline activists who contest “the discursive positioning of infrastructure as a gateway to a modern future” whose promises and sense of inevitability have become vital to “state-building projects around the world” (2018, 42). As Abdulghafoor and Hussein narrate the tragedy of the unnecessary airport, they are opening space for alternative “critical infrastructures” for the rural Maldives that push back against the seeming inevitability of urbanized growth. Their visions point to distinct ways of sustaining islands, oceans, and economic lives.
Footnotes
References
Abdulghafoor, Humay. 2022. “Maldives: Climate Doublespeak and the Great Deformation.” Dhivehi Sitee: Reflections in Times of Exile and Exclusion. February 2, 2022. https://www.dhivehisitee.com/environment/maldives-climate-doublespeak-and-the-great-deformation/
Abdulghafoor, Humay. 2023. “Maldives: Ecocide as Achievement.” Dhivehi Sitee: Reflections in Times of Exile and Exclusion. March 22, 2023. https://www.dhivehisitee.com/environment/maldives-ecocide-as-achievement/
Bryant, Nick. 2004. “Maldives: Paradise soon to be lost.” BBC News, July 28. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/southasia/3930765.stm
Crossan, Rob. 2025. “The Maldives: Paradise Lost?” JSTOR Daily, January 17. https://daily.jstor.org/the-maldives-paradise-lost/
Elinoff, Eli. 2019. “Cement.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, June 27. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/cement
Farbotko, Carol. 2010. “‘The global warming clock is ticking so see these places while you can’: Voyeuristic tourism and model environmental citizens on Tuvalu’s disappearing islands.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 31(2): 224-238.
Gray, Summer. 2023. In the Shadow of the Seawall: Coastal Injustice and the Dilemma of Placekeeping. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hirsch, Eric. 2015. “‘It Won’t Be Any Good to Have Democracy if we Don’t Have a Country’: Climate Change and the Politics of Synecdoche in the Maldives.” Global Environmental Change 35: 190-198.
Hirsch, Eric. 2022. Acts of Growth: Development and the Politics of Abundance in Peru. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327-43.
Neubert, Christopher. 2020. “Slaughterhouse Politics” (41-58). In The Immigrant-Food Nexus: Borders, Labor, and Identity in North America, edited by Julian Agyeman and Sydney Giacalone. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ortner, Sherry B. 1974. “Is female to male as nature is to culture?” (68-87). In Woman, culture, and society, edited by M.Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Ritchie, Hannah. 2024. “What share of global CO2 emissions come from aviation?” Our World in Data, April 8. https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions
Spice, Anne. 2018. “Fighting Invasive Infrastructures: Indigenous Relations against Pipelines.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 9(1): 40-56.
Uthema. 2020a. “Women at Work – Ropeweavers of Kulhudhuffushi, Maldives.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOy5g1gzLMo
Uthema. 2020b. “Impact on Women’s Livelihoods – Kulhudhuffushi.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB5r7Sxi97o
Voyles, Traci. 2015. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Zhang, Adela. 2022. “Populist infrastructures: The aesthetics and semiotics of how obras do politics in Lima, Peru.” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 27(4): 587-600.
