Executive Summary
The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) faces significant sustainability and environmental challenges that are amplified by climate change. While the Lao PDR is not as highly exposed to natural hazards as its neighbors, its limited economic resources create challenges for disaster management and climate change adaptation. Hydrological hazards such as flooding, droughts, and storms frequently impact rural areas, affecting the agricultural livelihoods on which most of the population relies. They also cause disease outbreaks, threaten food security, and force communities to migrate due to concerns for personal safety and the security of their livelihoods. Most of the land in the Lao PDR is degraded due to the impacts of droughts, flooding, and landslides, as well as the unsustainable use of natural resources, which has been accelerated by the marketization of agriculture. As a country with approximately 60% forest cover, the Lao PDR aims to strike a balance between the economic benefits of the forestry industry and the climate change mitigation and adaptation benefits of forest conservation.
Nearly three-quarters of households in the Lao PDR are engaged in agriculture, a sector highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and disasters. In devastating floods in 2018, the agriculture sector—including fisheries and forestry—suffered nearly 60% of the total economic losses. Climate projections for the Lao PDR indicate more frequent and destructive droughts, storms, and floods in the future due to longer hot and dry periods and an increase in mean average rainfall that will likely cause more intense periods of rainfall in the wet season. Due to a complex topography, the Lao PDR has over 40 unique livelihood groups, each with different vulnerabilities to the impacts of natural hazards and climate change. The most vulnerable groups are those dependent on highland rice paddies, as the rugged terrain in these areas limits access to productive land and opportunities to diversify livelihoods. Climate change will bring challenges for the Lao PDR including rural impoverishment, food insecurity, migration, and changes in work and education opportunities that also impact family relations and work-related gender roles. These challenges can negatively impact the overall gender equality situation.
The Lao PDR has increased the education rates of girls and has made progress in the representation of women in managerial and senior roles in both the public and private sectors. However, high rates of violence against women and children persist, and as reporting is uncommon, victims/survivors often do not have access to justice. Compared to men, women also have poor employment opportunities and working conditions, as well as limited access to land and financial capital. These key areas of socioeconomic development are likely to be exacerbated further with the rise in climate and disaster-related risks. Therefore, alongside the challenges of combating disaster and climate impacts, it is crucial to ensure that women’s socioeconomic resilience is increased so that women and men move forward with increased equality of outcomes. This requires a focus, not only on how climate and disaster-related laws and policies can be more gender responsive but also on improving gender equality in key socioeconomic areas that impact women’s resilience.
The purpose of this report was to conduct a gender analysis of the national legal and policy frameworks of the Lao PDR to determine whether laws, policies, and strategies consider gender inequalities as they relate to climate and disaster risk and contribute to strengthening women’s resilience. The laws of a country set the legal framework and provide the foundation to regulate a sector and guarantee fundamental rights and policies should further amplify legal provisions and implement legislative guarantees. A National Good Practice Legislative Framework was developed for the analysis in this report. The framework draws on (i) the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) General Recommendation No. 37 on the gender-related dimensions of disaster risk reduction in the context of climate change (CEDAW GR37), and (ii) a report on best practice legal frameworks in Asia and the Pacific, which assists in selecting laws and policies related to the national approach to gender equality, climate and disaster risks, as well as socioeconomic development to be gender analyzed. The analysis of the selected laws and policies informed an assessment of the extent to which equality and discrimination concepts are explicit in laws and policies and how this affects women’s resilience to climate and disaster risks. The report methodology included secondary data collection and analysis, support by a country mission, stakeholder interviews, and national workshops.
Results of the analysis found that the Law on Gender Equality 2019 (LGE) is gender responsive, with some gender positive provisions, as it incorporates important equality principles and provides for overcoming cultural beliefs that inhibit women’s advancement. Crucially, it mandates gender mainstreaming in laws and policies across all areas of work. The law is accompanied by an ambitious policy for implementation—the National Action Plan on Gender Equality 2021–2025 (NAPGE)—which is gender responsive and includes a broad spectrum of gender positive targets, such as introducing quotas for women and girls over a broad spectrum of activities including leadership roles in the areas such as climate change and disaster risk reduction. With more detailed action plans for each set of targets and new complaints procedures, the law and action plan can support effective integration of gender considerations and an increase in the participation of women in decision making on issues relating to resilience to climate change and disasters.
Despite these achievements, the analysis reveals that there is a notable lack of commitments to equality and nondiscrimination in key laws and policies related to disaster risk management, environment, and climate change.
The laws and policies of the Lao PDR in these areas are based on formal equality between men and women, but do not address gender inequality and gender differences in risks or needs or provide mechanisms for the collection of sex-disaggregated data, gender analysis, gender mainstreaming, or the specific engagement of women in their institutions and processes. A notable exception is the Decree on Environmental Impact Assessments 2019 (EIA Decree), which mandates the collection of information and conduct of assessments relating to gender. Another positive step forward is the inclusion of the Lao Women’s Union (LWU) in the Technical Working Group on Climate Change, which promotes the participation of women in environmental policy making. LWU is also included in Village Disaster Management Committees under the Law on Disaster Management (DM Law), although not in the district, provincial, or central DM Committee. The capacity of LWU to influence women’s resilience through these mechanisms is also limited by the lack of any specific gender criteria or targets in the relevant law and policy frameworks. Similar findings from a close analysis of agriculture sector laws and policies reveal no integration of gender equality and nondiscrimination principles and no mention of the gender dimensions of agriculture considered in related laws or policies. The one exception is the National Agro-Biodiversity Program and Action Plan 2021–2025, which goes some way towards gender sensitivity by acknowledging the different roles of men and women in managing and using agro-biodiversity resources and calls for their knowledge to be incorporated into management plans.
In addition to sector-specific laws and policies, several laws governing socioeconomic areas which can contribute to building women’s resilience to climate change and disaster risk were analyzed. The report focuses on three areas (i) combating gender-based violence (GBV), (ii) improving women’s access to assets, and (iii) increasing women’s access to decent work. Findings reveal that both the Law on Preventing and Combatting Violence against Women and Children 2014 and the Law on Development and Protection of Women 2004 promote the settlement and mediation of violence against women, which is contrary to international best practice as outlined in CEDAW General Recommendations Numbers 33 and 35. The National Plan of Action on Protection and Elimination of Violence Against Women and Children (2021–2025) represents a positive step forward in terms of collecting data on victims/survivors of GBV, which can be used to design gender-responsive measures. With women’s access to assets, the report findings note that as of 2021 no laws or policies about land tenure and inheritance (women’s access to assets) include concepts of equality and nondiscrimination. Given the influence of patrilineal traditional inheritance customs that preference sons over daughters—and the fact that most rural land users do not have legal documentation for land tenure—gender-responsive laws and policies in this area are crucial. Finally, with decent work for women, the analysis found several areas of concern that are not explicitly addressed by sector law or policy, or where the laws and policies perpetuate discrimination. These include workplace sexual harassment, the gender pay gap, and barriers to women’s access to minimum wage and financial capital.
In conclusion, the report finds that sector laws and policies that affect women’s resilience to climate change and disasters in the Lao PDR are not yet gender mainstreamed. The exception is the Decree on Environmental Impact Assessment 2019 (EIA Decree), which is classified as gender sensitive, as it supports the collection of genderrelated information. However, its impact is likely to be limited without a comprehensive set of laws and policies to clearly define and enforce commitments to gender equality across a range of environmental and socioeconomic issue areas. The LGE and the NAPGE can serve as useful starting points in this regard. The report includes a set of specific and general recommendations to address some of the gaps in the Lao PDR law and policy framework.
Specific Recommendations:
(i) Develop gender responsive guidance to accompany the Law on Gender Equality to define key concepts and complement the National Action Plan on Gender Equality, laying the foundation for gender responsive implementation measures across all sectors.
(ii) Support women’s participation in decision making in the National Strategy on Climate Change (2021– 2030) and future reviews of the Climate Change Decree to generate gender responsive climate change measures and meet the NAPGE’s ambitious targets for women’s participation and leadership in climate change decision making.
(iii) Integrate measures to support women’s resilience in the implementation of the Law on Disaster Management through the National Strategy on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and its 5-year action plans, to address women’s participation in DRR, and differential needs in disaster contexts, including support for women living in rural areas and other high-risk situations.
(iv) Support women’s resilience through the right to live without violence with revisions to the Law on Preventing and Combatting Violence against Women and Children 2014 and strong implementation of the National Plan of Action on Protection and Elimination of Violence Against Women and Children (2021–2025).
(v) Enhance women’s economic capacity through changes to the wage equality provisions in the Law on Labor (2014), by making a new law on the prevention of harassment and violence in the workplace and investing in the development of women-led micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs).
(vi) Improve women’s access to land, housing, and agricultural resources through gender mainstreaming the Law on Land 2019, the Law on Resettlement and Vocation 2018, the Law on Forestry 2007, and the National Agro-Biodiversity Program and Action Plan (2021−2025).
General Recommendations:
(i) Collection and analysis of disaggregated data needs to be prioritized.
(ii) Increasing women’s participation in DRR, climate change adaptation, and environmental decision making is essential.
(iii) Consolidate a gender responsive approach to climate change and disaster risk policy development and implementation.
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