Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
cent talk of stricter accountability—a belated response to years of theft and corruption
scandals—global financial bureaucracies still have three main imperatives: lend, lend,
and lend some more. The World Bank froze its funding to Cambodia in 2011 over the
Boeung Kak lake eviction, but by late 2013 it had initiated two new projects using auxili-
approached for support for its plans to restart loans, said disengaging was simply “not an
option.” As he said, “Their aim is to be here 10 years or 15 years.”
Where the UN has crossed the road to reach the middle, the World Bank and ADB
continue to apply their neoliberal economic models in apparent disregard for Cambodia's
political and social context. The outcome, as in many other developing countries, has
been ambiguous. Free market templates have stoked economic growth, yielding an im-
pressive annual crop of GDP growth figures, but they have also produced a typhoon cap-
italism that has empowered a predatory elite, opened up a massive gap between rich and
poor, and undercut one of their supposedly central priorities: poverty reduction.
The accommodations that are made at the top invariably trickle downward, to the interna-
tional and local NGOs that rely on donor funding. Like the Cambodian government, these
groups have been forced to adapt the agendas and language of outside patrons. Increasing
amounts of time are now spent writing funding proposals and progress reports servicing
long lists of donor requirements. These can range from the ideological—like the onerous
restrictions the US government places on the offering of abortion services by American-
funded health NGOs—to simply what is considered fashionable in global development
circles at any given time. There is plenty of money to combat HIV/AIDS, for instance,
but much less for fighting diabetes. Climate change has emerged as a sexy field, despite
the fact that landlessness, debt, and the transformation of the rural agricultural economy
will swallow most Cambodian farmers long before global warming does.
As donor countries have shifted in recent years toward short-termism and instant res-
ults, NGOs have moved in the same direction. Faced with government pressure, shorter-
term disbursals of funds, and donor pressures to “engage,” many Cambodian NGOs have
retreated into a tame conference culture characterized by the liberal use of PowerPoint
bromides and euphemistic development jargon. At these workshops, held every day at a
dozen hotel conference halls in Phnom Penh, deeply political questions about good gov-
ernance and human rights—even seemingly less political issues like health and educa-
tion—are expressed in the deadening language of “hurdles” and “cross-cutting issues.”
A whole generation of Cambodian NGO workers has been trained in the use of this
clotted cant. This language finds its supreme manifestation in the hundreds of grant pro-
posals and reports that are churned out each year by the development complex. (If Pol Pot
were alive today, it's not hard to imagine him talking about “mainstreaming” the party
