ABSTRACTED FROM EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This report highlights important dimensions of food security in rural Lao PDR, including: the different gender roles in agriculture; reliance on community-level social cohesion as both a coping mechanism and means of livelihood; and the ongoing challenge of shifting rural livelihoods from a subsistence basis towards market-orientation. The findings of this report give a snapshot of rural livelihoods and practice.

The highlands of mainland Southeast Asia have famously been the locus of “Zomia,” polities resistant to control by lowland nation-states, but this relative resilience has been due to their marginality.

In the two decades since the 1992 Rio Conference, Land-Use Planning (LUP) has become recognized as a key instrument in putting discourses on sustainable development into practice. In Lao PDR, despite the implementation problems, it is still seen as a lever for securing land tenure, rationalizing extension services provision, and more recently, for implementing ‘Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation’ (REDD) schemes. Impact assessments of past LUP have revealed weaknesses of local institutions in the effective implementation of land policies.

Since the emergence of the sustainable development paradigm in the late 1980s, land-use planning has become a key arena for political debates over society-environment interactions and, in practice, an important means for territorialisation projects. The paper reviews the main planning approaches that have been employed over the past three decades in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, a country that has long been viewed as a valuable policy testing ground for the proponents of sustainable development.

This participatory poverty assessment (PPA 2006) comprises one component of ADB’s Technical Assistance to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic for Institutional Strengthening for Poverty Monitoring and Evaluation. The goal of this PPA, as with the first PPA in 2000, is to complement the statistical analyses of poverty in a meaningful way and to record the experiences and concerns of the poor in order to initiate and identify more effective forms of public and private actions to alleviate poverty.

The emergence of social and environmental movements against plantation forestry in Southeast Asia positions rural development against local displacement and environmental degradation. Multi-scaled NGO networks have been active in promoting the notion that rural people in Southeast Asia uniformly oppose plantation development. There are potential pitfalls in this heightened attention to resistance however, as it has often lapsed into essentialist notions of timeless indigenous agricultural practices, and unproblematic local allegiances to common property and conservation.

As governments, the private sector, multilateral institutions, and international development organisations weigh the options for improving food security around the world, they must consider one of the most promising elements for addressing the needs of the world’s hungry and malnourished: secure land rights. Addressing land rights issues—in particular, women’s land rights—in programmes and policies designed to address food security and nutrition through agriculture can deepen the impact of those interventions and lead to improved development outcomes.

The IGTN Advocacy Document for the 5th WTO Ministerial Meeting that was held in Cancun, Mexico in September 2003 focuses on these four issues and identifies critical advocacy positions for each of them. With regard to agriculture, the IGTN asserts that control over agriculture by states rather than the WTO would ensure that small-scale and subsistence farmers have control over farming and food supply; a particularly important concern for women around the world who are those responsible for ensuring household food security and managing family farms.

Because of their lower social and economic status, as well as physiological needs, women are often more vulnerable to nutritional problems. When it comes to sharing food resources in the home, women and girls can lose out. Indeed, the full realisation of the right to food for women depends on parallel achievements in the right to health, education, access to information and access to resources such as land.

This Supporting Resources Collection - part of the BRIDGE Cutting Edge Pack on Gender and Climate Change- showcases existing work on gender and climate change. It presents summaries of a mix of conceptual and research papers, policy briefings, advocacy documents, case study material and practical tools from diverse regions. Examining why a focus on gender and climate change is important, the resources look at the human and gender impacts of climate change, the global and national responses to climate change and locally relevant gender aware responses to climate change.

Women's access to land is a fundamental factor in food security. Yet women all over the world suffer under discriminatory property and inheritance laws and customary practices which restrict their rights over the land on which they live and work. Articles 15 and 16 of CEDAW state the rights of women to property and inheritance. This report is a tool to help non-governmental organisations and multilateral agencies in advocacy and policy dialogue using CEDAW and the Optional Protocol (which allows individuals and groups to make complaints directly to the CEDAW committee).

Climate change is increasingly being recognised as a global crisis, but responses to it have so far been overly focused on scientific and economic solutions. How then do we move towards morepeople-centred, gender-aware climate change policies and processes? How do we respond to the different needs and concerns of women and men, and also challenge the gender inequalities that mean women are more likely to lose out than men in the face of climate change? This In Brief sets out why it is vital to address the gender dimensions of climate change.