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coming up with strategies to use the government, to change the government from within … The
CPP is much smarter than that. But you don't need to be smart to play the donors, because the
donors don't really care about the outcome. Perception is more important than the result, more
important than anything else.
Seeking the greatest “outcomes” at the smallest cost, donors have shifted their focus to
social sectors like health and education, especially those linked to the UN's Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs), global development targets set for 2015. Needs in these
areas have the advantage of being both genuinely pressing—many Cambodian people
still need food and medicine—and seemingly quarantined from politics. They are also
easy to quantify, giving donors tangible outputs—schoolchildren enrolled, health centers
opened—that can be easily summarized in year-end reports. As one long-time Cambodian
development expert put it, “those donors subscribing to the MDG goals want to justify
their presence. They need positive indicators. And because of lack of government ser-
vices for the people, it's easy to step in.”
Service provision and MDG targets may be expedient for donors, but the focus on stat-
istical measures can be misleading—especially with government agencies fudging the
stats. “Monitoring indicators are about counting,” said Caroline McCausland, the head of
ActionAid in Cambodia. “They're not about quality, and they're not about change. So you
can say Cambodia's made huge steps forward, it's got 90 percent enrollment in schools.
Brilliant. But where's the quality? There's no improvement on that level. In many ways
it's gone backwards.” And there's another effect: while donors keep filling gaps, the gov-
ernment can keep ignoring its most basic responsibilities, diverting its resources into the
patronage state. All this perpetuates Cambodia's dependence on the foreign aid dollar.
The accommodation between donors and government has exacerbated the tendency to
view political problems—which is to say, most problems—as “technical” issues. As the
Australian political scientist Michael Wesley has observed, the “narrow focus” on tech-
nocratic tasks is handy for Western donors eager to avoid resonances of neocolonialism.
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In Cambodia this has been a prescription for failure. Land and forestry reforms based on
“technical support” to corrupt ministries have failed to address the political incentive to
steal land and cut down trees, and therefore failed to halt the problem. Helping Cambod-
ia create a constitution and laws enshrining human rights did nothing to guarantee their
implementation. One might also toss in UNHCR's support to the Cambodian Refugee Of-
fice, which proceeded in apparent ignorance at what would happen when politics and law
came—inevitably—into conflict.
This way of thinking is so pervasive that an analysis published by the Brookings Insti-
tution in 2008 could offer a detailed anatomy of aid effectiveness in Cambodia and barely
mention the realities of politics or patronage. It summed up its argument:
