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In-Depth Information
templates, which would trim back the state and improve Cambodia's global “competitive-
ness.” Others prioritized the building of democratic institutions and the crafting of pro-
gressive laws. “Development” in this sense was simply a matter of assembling the right
set of instructions and then shoveling money toward their implementation.
The approach took little heed of local contexts and conditions. The agenda was set by
drop-in development missionaries with little or no knowledge of Cambodia and its his-
tory. Truth be told, Cambodia and its history didn't much matter. The most important
political and social questions had all been settled. The country's main problem wasn't its
political culture, with its mesh of patrimonial relationships and the amassing of power
by self-focused elites, but rather its lack of capacity to implement known solutions. If
the world was trending inevitably in the direction of democracy, universal rights, and all
things good, all Cambodia needed was a little developmental nudge. All it needed was to
have its capacity “built.”
But Cambodia in 1992 was hardly a blank slate. The CPP had spent the previous dec-
ade rebuilding a shattered nation and sinking its political roots, and it resented the arrival
of the UN with its long tail of foreign consultants and Panglossian NGO “action plans.”
For Hun Sen and his colleagues, history was still very much a work in progress. All the
talk of democracy they saw as a moral cover for the interests of foreign powers that had
openly or clandestinely supported the Khmer Rouge throughout the 1980s. The CPP des-
perately needed aid money to counter the falloff in Soviet rubles, but resisted any reform
that would undermine its own power.
All the while, donors, parachuted into the optimistic maelstrom of the early 1990s,
proceeded as if Cambodia had returned to a developmental Year Zero. “People assumed
nothing happened in Cambodia during the '80s,” recalled Darryl Bullen, an Australian
development consultant who first visited Cambodia in the middle of that decade. Foreign
donors took the view that Cambodia was “a clean sheet, that there'd been an election,
and that therefore that all the public servants that'd previously been in positions of power
were just going to roll over and have their tummies tickled.”
The coup of July 1997 demonstrated just how far theory diverged from reality. When
the dust settled, and a flawed election had restored Hun Sen's legitimacy, the donors re-
assessed. They announced that aid disbursements would now be tied to a set of reform
benchmarks, known as “Joint Monitoring Indicators.” Various bodies and mechanisms
were contrived to monitor the targets. There were the 18 Technical Working Groups
(TWGs), which fed plans and reform recommendations in various sectors into the
Government-Donor Coordination Committee, another aid talk-shop which met periodic-
ally in Phnom Penh. Crowning this edifice of red tape was the Consultative Group (CG)
meeting, held roughly every 18 months and chaired by the World Bank. Rebranded as
the CDCF in 2007, these meetings were the highest-level forum for donors to assess the
