ABSTRACT
Bearing in mind Sri Lanka’s size and economic capacity, the South Asian country performs outstandingly high on the CHAIn. As a consequence, this chapter analyzes the causes for Sri Lanka’s high number of reported health adaptation measures and evaluates whether what is written in the documents matches the measures on the ground. The expert interviews and content analysis have shown that the high CHAIn score generally represents what the country claims it is doing in terms of health adaptation to climate change, but in practice the groundwork-level initiatives definitely dominate over adaptation-level measures. Sri Lanka’s overall stellar performance can in most parts be explained by the strong direct and indirect influence of international organizations, such as the World Bank and UN organizations, through putting climate change on the national agenda, spreading knowledge and expertise, and building capacities. Importantly, however, a major criticism of the international community’s initiatives in vulnerable countries like Sri Lanka is the lack of transition from project ownership to policy ownership to ensure the sustainability of the introduced measures.
