WEBSITE INTRODUCTION: This thematic study presents a country-level overview of customary tenure arrangements in Lao PDR. It examines the extent of customary tenure and land formalization in the country, key policy changes that have impacted on customary arrangements, the degree to which customary land is recognized legally and in practice, and explores opportunities for better recognition. Customary tenure covers a wide range of land types and resources, and provides livelihood security for a majority of the Lao rural population, particularly ethnic minorities and women.

Land uses are changing rapidly in Vietnam’s upland northern borderlands. Regional development platforms such as the Greater Mekong Subregion, state-propelled market integration and reforestation programs, and lowland entrepreneurs and migrants are all impacting this frontier landscape. Drawing on a mixed methods approach using remote sensing data from 2000 to 2009 and ethnographic fieldwork, we examine how land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) has occurred across three borderland provinces—Lai Châu, Lào Cai and Hà Giang—with high proportions of ethnic minority semi-subsistence farmers.

Chongjom border is a contested area which reflects power-related relationship between center and its marginal space. From deserted borderland in the buffer zone during Khmer Rouge period, Chongjom becomes an emerging 4th ranking of cross-border trading between Thailand and Cambodia, where value of exporting goods have been increased up to 224.05 % in 2013. The politics of changes in land use and property relations change lead to widen of land grabbing in the area.

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.

Since the early 1960s, notwithstanding dire predictions of agricultural theorists and colonial observers, agricultural growth has been strong among most Southeast Asian countries. More recently, this expansion has reached the maritime domain, with the rapid development of aquatic production through sea-based aquaculture among others. In recent territorial expansion and increase in yields for export crops has been faster than for food crops.

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.

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.

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.