Landslides occur regularly in the hilly areas of Sri Lanka. This chapter
focuses on the proposed voluntary displacement and resettlement process that took
place in a landslide-affected hilly town in Sri Lanka. A gender impact assessment of
the process reveals two major effects on the lives of women: it deprived them of
economic opportunities since they would be resettled far away from the original
area which offered them livelihood; and it affected land ownership rights accorded
to women by traditional legal systems. Considering that the unit of analysis for
resettlement was the household, patriarchal bias in official decision-making tended
to confer ownership of the new property on the official head of the household, often
a male, even if the de facto owner of the original property was a woman. The
coexistence of tradition and modernity in a changing social environment created
contradictions among women and men. Trapped between these paradoxes, women
faced the threat of increased vulnerabilities and erosion of their traditional rights.