Resettlement in Lao PDR: mobility, resistance and gendered impacts

Abstract

Villagers in northern Laos have been on the move for generations. Recent changes, however, in the location of their village and their daily mobility patterns differ from what they have experienced before; the government's resettlement programme has changed their livelihoods and made them more socially and economically vulnerable. The ethnic groups we studied have decided to use mobility to resist state control and seek livelihood security for themselves. By using the concept of motility, this article analyses how this household and community choices have a gender-differentiated impact. The mobility patterns of men and women have changed. While men attend to long-term investments, women are forced to make ends meet on a day-to-day basis. Men visit the market and public places more frequently, while women spend more time looking for non-timber forest products and working as hired labour. Although women now support the family and their mobility has increased, their say in the household seems to be on the decline, resulting in weakening women's motility.

Reasentamiento en la RDP de Lao: motilidad, resistencia e impactos generizados

Los aldeanos en el norte de Laos han estado en movimiento por generaciones. Los cambios recientes, sin embargo, en la ubicación de sus aldeas y sus patrones diarios de movilidad difieren de los que han experimentado anteriormente; el programa de reasentamiento del gobierno ha cambiado sus medios de vida y los ha hecho más vulnerables social y económicamente. Los grupos étnicos que estudiamos han decidido utilizar la movilidad para resistir el control estatal y buscar una seguridad en los medios de vida para sí mismos. Utilizando el concepto de motilidad, este artículo analiza cómo las elecciones del hogar y la comunidad tienen un impacto diferenciado según el género. Los patrones de movilidad de los hombres y las mujeres han cambiado. Mientras los hombres se ocupan de las inversiones a largo plazo, las mujeres se ven obligadas a ganarse la vida día a día. Los hombres van al mercado y los lugares públicos más frecuentemente, mientras que las mujeres pasan más tiempo buscando productos del bosque no madereros y trabajando como contratadas. Aunque las mujeres ahora sostienen a la familia y su movilidad ha aumentado, su influencia en el hogar parece estar en declive, resultando en un debilitamiento de la motilidad de las mujeres.

重新安顿于老挝人民共和国（寮国）：流动、反抗与性别化的影响

老挝北部的村民，数代以来皆处于迁徙之中。但晚近的村落地点与日常生活行动模式的改变，却不同于他们的过往经验；政府的再安置计画，改变了他们的生计，并使其在社会上及经济上更加脆弱。我们研究的族裔社群，决定以流动来抗拒国家的控制，并为自身寻求生计的安全。本文透过运用流动的概念，分析此一家户和社群的决定，如何产生具有性别差异的影响。男性与女性的流动模式已然改变。男性关注长期的投资，女性却被迫应付日常开支。男性更常造访市场与公共空间，而女性则花费更多的时间寻找非木材的森林产品，并从事僱佣劳动。儘管女性在目前支持着家庭、且其流动亦有所增加，但她们在家户中的话语权却似乎正在衰减，导致女性能动性的减弱。

Keywords::

• gender
• resettlement
• mobility
• Laos
• livelihoods

Palabras claves::

• género
• reasentamiento
• movilidad
• Laos
• medios de vida

关键词::

• 性别
• 再安置
• 流动
• 老挝（寮国）
• 生计

Notes

^1. In this article, indigenous people, ethnic groups and highlanders are used interchangeably. The Lao government does not recognise the use of the term ‘indigenous people’ and uses ‘ethnic groups’ instead. The literature this study is based on uses all of these terms.

^2. In this area, households (rangkha huang) refer to people living under the same roof, but not necessarily eating together. Families (khrob khrua), on the other hand, are those who work together and eat together.

^3. Officially, all land belongs to the state and people only have usufruct rights. There is mutual recognition and respect of usufruct among the highlanders across ethnic groups, and people will ask for permission to cultivate if the land is/has been used by other families in the community or other people in other villages. Normally, this does not require a financial transaction. However, since the demand for land in the area around Nam Daeng village is high, people now have to pay rent.

Additional information

Funding

This article is part of a larger collaborative research project, funded by the Research Council of Norway and titled ‘Mobile Livelihoods and Gendered Citizenship: The Counter-geographies of Indigenous People in India, Laos and China’. It is jointly undertaken by Ragnhild Lund, Kyoko Kusakabe, Smita Mishra Panda and Yunxian Wang, with partners in their respective countries.

Notes on contributors

Kyoko Kusakabe

Kyoko Kusakabe is associate professor of Gender and Development Studies at School of Environment, Resources and Development, Asian Institute of Technology. Her research interests are gender analysis of informal economy, focusing on mobility, migration and regional economic integration. Her research and outreach work is in close collaboration with NGOs and government agencies, especially in the Mekong region. She co-authored Thailand's Hidden Workforce: Burmese Migrant Women Factory Workers (2012) with Ruth Pearson, edited Gender, Road and Mobility in Asia (2012), and co-edited Gender, Mobilities, and Livelihood Transformations: Comparing Indigenous People in China, India, and Laos (2014). She also co-authored with R. Pearson ‘Cross-Border Childcare Strategies of Burmese Migrant Workers in Thailand’ in Gender, Place and Culture 20 (8) (2013), and ‘Relational Places of Burman Women Migrants in the Borderland Town of Tachilek, Myanmar’ in Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (2007) with Zin Mar Oo.

Ragnhild Lund

Ragnhild Lund is professor of Geography/Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology since 1994. Her research interests are development theory, forced migration, post-crisis recovery, transnational feminism and women's activism. The present projects she is working on are about mobile livelihoods, rethinking gender, politics of youth, domestic violence and cultural encounters. She is editor and author of Gender and Place (1994), Renegotiating Local Values: Working Women and Foreign Industry in Malaysia (1994), In the Maze of Displacement (2003), Global Childhood, Globalization, Development and Young People (2008), The Tsunami of 2004 in Sri Lanka: Impacts and Policy in the Shadow of Civil War (2010), Gender, Mobilities and Livelihood Transformation Comparing Indigenous People in China, India and Laos (2013) and Gendered Entanglements (forthcoming). She has edited Gender, Technology and Development and is presently editor of the Norwegian Journal of Geography.

Smita Mishra Panda

Smita Mishra Panda is Professor and Director Research at the Centurion University of Technology and Management, Odisha. She was formerly Professor at the School of Management at the Human Development Foundation in Odisha, India. Her research interests include gender issues in development, natural resource management (water and forests), governance and tribal livelihoods.

Yunxian Wang

Yunxian Wang is an independent researcher affiliated to the Institute of Economics at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Prior to that, she was a Senior Research Fellow at the National Research Institute, Papua New Guinea, a development practitioner in Oxfam Hong Kong and a bilateral poverty alleviation programme. She has worked on a vast range of development issues including gender and development, rural–urban migrant community development and labour rights, civil society and NGO development. Dr Wang writes on the issues of gender and poverty, mobilities and urban livelihoods, economic empowerment of women, etc. She co-edited books on ‘Women and Poverty Alleviation Strategy in China’ (Chinese), ‘Gender, Mobilities, and Livelihood Transformations: Comparing Indigenous People in China, India, and Laos’ and ‘Mobile Livelihood and Social Transformations among Ethnic Minority People in Yunnan’ (Chinese). Her recent publication is a discussion paper ‘Women's Market Participation and Potential for Business Advancement in Papua New Guinea’.

Sengkham Vongphakdy

Sengkham Vongphakdy is a researcher at the Public Works and Transport Institute, Vientiane, Lao PDR. She is trained as a planner.