By Eric Hirsch<\/a>, Associate Professor, Franklin & Marshall College<\/p>\n Readers of this post are likely to be familiar with the Maldives\u2019 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\u2019 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\u2019s organization 350.org<\/a>, the meeting became a viral news story that promised to create momentum ahead of the 2009 Copenhagen<\/a> climate conference. That year\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Maldives became well known as a low-lying atoll nation with its highest natural point a mere 2.5 meters above sea level\u2014which made it a perfect synecdoche<\/a> of sea-level rise and \u201csinking\u201d nations (Hirsch 2015<\/a>). 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\u2019s struggles through a \u201cparadise lost\u201d lens (Bryant 2004; Crossan 2025), a common framing for small island nations (Farbotko 2010).<\/p>\n Given their plea for the world to think of the country\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019 surface land area totals about 300 km2<\/sup> (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<\/sup> (roughly the size of the US state of Maine). The country now rivals the US in airports per capita1<\/a><\/sup>. To be sure, a high number of airports is not unusual for many countries in the 2020s. Airports have been expanding<\/a> 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 Mal\u00e9, the Maldivian capital where about one-third of the country\u2019s population is concentrated, these airports serve relatively few people. They have not replaced the country\u2019s robust inter-island ferry transportation system, which is significantly more affordable than air travel.<\/p>\n The Maldives\u2019 climate advocacy, its internal concern about the impacts of fossil fuel emissions, its ongoing commitment<\/a> to global mitigation targets despite the many changes in government since Nasheed\u2019s administration, and its deep history of long-distance seafaring and ocean mobility therefore make the country\u2019s many airports a jarring sight (see map below).\u00a0<\/p>\n Several of these airports are quite close to one another. Some do not serve many flights. Citizens<\/a> are raising concern about whether airports<\/a> represent the best use<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2014if just barely\u2014 on the island of Kulhudhuffushi during the Maldives\u2019 2018 presidential campaign. The project\u2019s 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 \u201cdeep state.\u201d The conflict over this politically performative airport also highlights the role of what Christopher Neubert calls \u201cintimate geopolitics\u201d (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.<\/p>\n For environmental activist Humay Abdulghafoor, airports exemplify the gap between the Maldives\u2019 international advocacy for small islands acutely exposed to climate change impacts and its short-sighted leaders\u2019 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 Caf\u00e9, a restaurant perched above the Mal\u00e9 city ferry station with views of massive container ships lumbering through the harbor and the much smaller ferries shuttling between the metro area\u2019s islands. The middle-aged Humay co-hosts an influential blog called Dhivehi Sitee<\/em><\/a>, 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 \u201ca misnomer\u201d because it did not, in fact, have \u201cagency.\u201d<\/p>\n One of Abdulghafoor\u2019s 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<\/a>. 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, \u201chighly skilled work\u201d that had been passed down \u201cfor generations\u201d which \u201csupplemented their other income, you know, the \u2018man\u2019s income,\u2019 if you like.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yameen made the case for the airport in a rally there in 2017, as covered<\/a> by the now-defunct Maldives Independent<\/em>. Noting that airports were the \u201cbackbone of all economic work,\u201d 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: \u201cI\u2019m 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?\u201d He suggested letting the island\u2019s young people make what he presented as an obvious choice: \u201cWould you rather have the opportunity to earn more from tourism or would you rather beat coconut husks till your eyesight is all but gone?\u201d His speech promised an operational airport by the following year, when the reelection campaign would be in full swing.\u00a0<\/p>\n He kept his promise. Technically. Abdulghafoor recounted the airport\u2019s 2018 opening as an utter debacle:<\/p>\n 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, \u201cOkay, now you have an airport.\u201d Doesn\u2019t matter if they could use it or not. There\u2019s the airport, you know. Here\u2019s the picture. That is the level of political delivery, of promises here.<\/em><\/p>\n Yameen\u2019s 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\u2019s, have had power (although faith in infrastructure crosses party lines; see Gray 2023). Yameen\u2019s 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\u2019s wetlands, which Abdulghafoor described:<\/p>\n The wetland is part of its defense system, the island\u2019s own defense system, which has obviously evolved over time to be what it is, because it\u2019s the drainage system of the island. And I think the wetlands here are slightly different to elsewhere because we don\u2019t have huge land masses. So what we\u2019ve 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\u2026The island\u2019s natural defenses are pretty good. And man hadn\u2019t 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.<\/em><\/p>\n Thoriq Ibrahim, Minister of the Environment at the time (and once again as of November 2023), overruled the EPA\u2019s decision. \u201cThis was in the run-up to the COP in Bonn. I can\u2019t remember the number now, which COP it is, there\u2019s been so many,\u201d Abdulghafoor told me. The Minister \u201cflew off to the COP around the same week that he signed off to build this airport.\u201d Still, the airport was not constructed without resistance. Non-governmental groups publicized<\/a> the destructive move. Demonstrators assembled in protest of the airport. They were dispersed by police \u201cspecial ops<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n In Bonn, the minister promised that the dispossessed weavers would be taken care of in some way,\u00a0 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. \u201cWhat Kulhudhuffushi really needed was a hospital,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The women weavers were excluded from the all-male consultation meetings with local and national governments and with the EPA. Women\u2019s work was invisibilized in the face of infrastructure installation, even though it could often be the main source of household income. The Maldivian women\u2019s advocacy group Uthema<\/a> put together several short web documentaries about the island\u2019s weavers and the economic lives that the airport project would destabilize. One video<\/a> (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. \u201cPeople of the island criticized the plans a lot,\u201d Hussain says, \u201csaying that the airport could have been built somewhere else on the island too.\u201d However, the all-male island council did not stop the project or ask to move it. Yameen\u2019s electoral urgency meant a rushed project that blindsided the weavers. Hussain describes emergency efforts to rescue as many husks as possible.<\/p>\n 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\u2026I make very thin coir rope now, that can be used as keychains. I\u2019ve given up on making thicker rope now that we have lost our pits.<\/em><\/p>\n A second, shorter video<\/a>, also produced by Uthema (2020b), presents the devastation to Kulhudhuffushi\u2019s 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<\/a> of continual shore maintenance in the face of exacerbated erosion to the tune of $1.4 million and counting (Abdulghafoor 2023).<\/p>\n Abdulla Yameen\u2019s 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\u2019s more environmentally friendly political party. Yet Yameen\u2019s 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\u2019s economy with the sudden concrete flattening of Kulhuduffushi\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Left in the wake of this barely used airport is the underside of infrastructure\u2019s 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 \u201cgreat deformation<\/a>\u201d of the national living space. Tlingit anthropologist Anne Spice develops a critique of the notion of \u201ccritical infrastructures\u201d from the standpoint of Unist\u2019ot\u2019en Indigenous anti-pipeline activists who contest \u201cthe discursive positioning of infrastructure as a gateway to a modern future\u201d whose promises and sense of inevitability have become vital to \u201cstate-building projects around the world\u201d (2018, 42). As Abdulghafoor and Hussein narrate the tragedy of the unnecessary airport, they are opening space for alternative \u201ccritical infrastructures\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Footnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n Abdulghafoor, Humay. 2022. \u201cMaldives: Climate Doublespeak and the Great Deformation.\u201d Dhivehi Sitee: Reflections in Times of Exile and Exclusion<\/em>. February 2, 2022. https:\/\/www.dhivehisitee.com\/environment\/maldives-climate-doublespeak-and-the-great-deformation\/<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n Abdulghafoor, Humay. 2023. \u201cMaldives: Ecocide as Achievement.\u201d Dhivehi Sitee: Reflections in Times of Exile and Exclusion<\/em>. March 22, 2023. https:\/\/www.dhivehisitee.com\/environment\/maldives-ecocide-as-achievement\/<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n Bryant, Nick. 2004. \u201cMaldives: Paradise soon to be lost.\u201d BBC News<\/em>, July 28. http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/southasia\/3930765.stm<\/a><\/p>\n Crossan, Rob. 2025. \u201cThe Maldives: Paradise Lost?\u201d JSTOR Daily<\/em>, January 17. https:\/\/daily.jstor.org\/the-maldives-paradise-lost\/<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n Elinoff, Eli. 2019. \u201cCement.\u201d Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights<\/em>, June 27. https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/cement<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n Farbotko, Carol. 2010. \u201c\u2018The global warming clock is ticking so see these places while you can\u2019: Voyeuristic tourism and model environmental citizens on Tuvalu\u2019s disappearing islands.\u201d Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography<\/em> 31(2): 224-238.<\/p>\n Gray, Summer. 2023. In the Shadow of the Seawall: Coastal Injustice and the Dilemma of Placekeeping<\/em>. Berkeley: University of California Press.<\/p>\n Hirsch, Eric.<\/strong> 2015. \u201c\u2018It Won\u2019t Be Any Good to Have Democracy if we Don\u2019t Have a Country\u2019: Climate Change and the Politics of Synecdoche in the Maldives.\u201d\u00a0Global Environmental Change\u00a0<\/em>35: 190-198.<\/p>\n Hirsch, Eric. 2022. Acts of Growth: Development and the Politics of Abundance in Peru<\/em>. Stanford: Stanford University Press.<\/p>\n Larkin, Brian. 2013. \u201cThe Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.\u201d Annual Review of Anthropology<\/em> 42: 327-43.<\/p>\n Neubert, Christopher. 2020. \u201cSlaughterhouse Politics\u201d (41-58). In The Immigrant-Food Nexus: Borders, Labor, and Identity in North America<\/em>, edited by Julian Agyeman and Sydney Giacalone. Cambridge: MIT Press.<\/p>\n Ortner, Sherry B. 1974. \u201cIs female to male as nature is to culture?\u201d (68-87). In Woman, culture, and society<\/em>, edited by M.Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford University Press.<\/p>\n Ritchie, Hannah. 2024. \u201cWhat share of global CO2 emissions come from aviation?\u201d Our World in Data<\/em>, April 8. https:\/\/ourworldindata.org\/global-aviation-emissions<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n Spice, Anne. 2018. \u201cFighting Invasive Infrastructures: Indigenous Relations against Pipelines.\u201d Environment and Society: Advances in Research<\/em> 9(1): 40-56.<\/p>\n Uthema. 2020a. \u201cWomen at Work \u2013 Ropeweavers of Kulhudhuffushi, Maldives.\u201d https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=cOy5g1gzLMo<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n
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