Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
enced “technical assistant,” foreign consultants can earn between $800 and $1,000 per
day on short-term contracts—amounts justified by their command of the esoteric lan-
guage of the World Bank and other development bureaucracies. In 2002, according to
ActionAid, donors paid 700 international consultants an estimated $50-70 million, an
amount roughly equivalent to the wage bills for 160,000 Cambodian civil servants.
23
Technical assistance has since fallen gradually, from as much as half of all aid money in
amounts of aid simply flow back out of the country.
Today Cambodia is stuck in a dependence spiral, in which a stubborn lack of govern-
ment “capacity” is matched by continuing aid disbursals. What started out as an invest-
ment in Cambodia's future in the early 1990s has evolved into an entrenched develop-
ment complex that has eroded democracy, undermined the livelihoods of the poor, and
given powerful elites a free hand to keep plundering the nation's resources for their own
gain.
As key international donors made their political accommodations with the Cambodian
government, their development priorities also started to shift. Facing a tightening of over-
seas aid budgets and fatigued at the slow pace of reform, they started quietly pulling
money out of areas where there had been the least progress. Most withdrew from forestry,
land, and judicial reform. In 2010 a donor-funded salary supplements scheme for civil
servants, which had tried and failed to reform the state bureaucracy (a reservoir of CPP
patronage), was canceled. The next year, the United Kingdom stopped its bilateral aid
program and closed its local development office. Denmark has done the same, as has
Canada, after its development agency CIDA was merged with the Department of Foreign
Affairs and International Trade in 2013.
Those donors that remained—France, Australia, Germany, the US, and Japan are
among the largest—started pressing for more concrete results, both in their own projects
and in those they were willing to support. Forceful advocacy and democracy promotion,
once reflected in the implicit pro-opposition bias of groups like the IRI and the USAID-
funded Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR), were on the way out. “Core fund-
ing,” the broad financial backing of Cambodian NGOs, gave way to smaller, more tar-
geted disbursals. One foreign rights advocate said international backers are now “more
interested in short-term results, in accepting the status quo … They've put most of their
eggs in the government's basket.”
Though the largest Cambodian human rights NGOs remain outspoken, vocal advocacy
is becoming taboo for donors. Ou Virak, the US-educated president of CCHR, told me:
Hun Sen is telling the donors, if you want to engage and work with me on reforms, don't bring
up human rights, don't bring up democracy, don't bring up any of these things. The donors keep
