Living with edges: rethinking housing policies in Sri Lanka’s contested landscapes

Abstract

Across the world, rural landscapes are increasingly becoming zones of competition; between agricul¬ture and conservation, infrastructure and ecology, and human safety and wildlife survival. Scholars describe these spaces as “contested landscapes”: places where ecological, social, and economic in¬terests overlap, generating continuous negotiation and conflict [1]. In such settings, decisions about land use, settlement, and development are never neutral; they are inherently political, ecological, and ethical. In Sri Lanka, contested landscapes manifest most visibly in the dry zone, where agricultural expansion, forest clearance, and rural resettlement initiatives have reconfigured ancient village territories into fragmented mosaics of cultivation, habitation, and remnant wildlife habitat. The most distressing con¬sequence of this transformation is the escalation of Human Elephant Conflict (HEC), which now claims hundreds of humans and elephant lives annually.