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line.) But NGO language, a sort of development Newspeak, also has more pernicious ef-
fects. Wittingly or not, the use of such soft language chimes with the official agenda,
which is to keep development safely quarantined from politics.
As with the UN, this inertia is reinforced by NGO bureaucracies that are self-focused
and protective of operational turf. It is true that some NGOs have closed their Cambodia
offices and moved on, fulfilling the goal of obsolescence. In 2009, for instance, Médecins
sans Frontières Belgium pulled out of Cambodia after determining that its emergency
mandate no longer applied. At the time, its outgoing country director, Philippe Berneau,
told me that MSF thought Cambodia now had the “capacity” to deal with major health
problems on its own (though he wondered about its willingness). In early 2011, the
Lutheran World Federation nationalized its operations in Cambodia under the name “Life
with Dignity.”
But these groups remain a small minority. While most NGOs pay lip service to the
idea of putting themselves out of business, they treat their mandates as basically perman-
ent. Instead of pursuing self-obsolescence, they accept aid dependency—and their roles
in propping up hollowed-out public services—as a fact of life. “I'm still on a career path,”
said the head of one major international NGO, describing the situation faced by many of
his colleagues. “Instead of thinking about how I'm going to continue to reduce my pres-
ence, my footprint, most of the time I'm thinking of how I'm going to keep my staff … I
don't want to preside over the demise of my organization.” Of the international NGOs in
Cambodia, “probably half” have no defined exit plan, the director said.
In large part this reflects the country's peculiar place in the global aid industry. Cam-
bodia is no longer the prestigious posting it was in the early 1990s. In career terms, it
is now relatively low on the global totem-pole—a place without the urgency of a Syria
or South Sudan. At the same time it is an extremely comfortable place to live and work.
The Phnom Penh expat life is a sybaritic blur of cheap entertainment, running the gamut
from panini bars and yoga classes to hip cafés, “social enterprise” setups, and cocktail
happy hours. Rent and domestic help are inexpensive, internet connections are fast, and
just about every sort of indulgence is imported from abroad. “They don't call it the 'Play
Penh' for nothing,” said Weh Yeoh, a Sydney native and Cambodia-based co-founder of
whydev.org, a website that scrutinizes the ethics and business of aid.
Each year hundreds of prospective foreign aid workers rotate through the country, tak-
ing jobs as program managers, legal consultants, volunteers, and interns with a wide spec-
trum of NGOs and nonprofits. Living in an extraterritorial settlement sustained by aid
money, few expatriates “really engage with Cambodian culture,” Yeoh said. “They don't
learn the language—90 percent of them don't learn the language. They're basically liv-
ing this lifestyle that they lived back in Australia or America or wherever, except that
they have more money relative to how much things cost.” The heads of large develop-
