Phnom Penh Post, Issue 15 / 26, December 29, 2006 - January 11, 2007
Last month, one of Cambodia's donors in the "Quadripartite Group" (the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and DFID) asked me to give a presentation on the problems of governance in Cambodia and the impact of the Seila ("Foundation Stone") rural investment planning and Millennium Development Goal/Poverty Reduction agendas on Cambodian governance, corruption, and sustainability.
I told them in simple terms: current approaches are contributing to destabilizing the country, to creating conditions for civil war, to impoverishing the country (in terms of per-capita ownership of national ASSETS), and to promoting corruption.
I don't think they heard me because they just kept asking what they could do to introduce more foreign capital and technology into Cambodia to make it more "productive."
I told them that Cambodia is like Humpty Dumpty - the royal egg that fell off a wall, 700 years ago and left scrambled eggs. What it needs to be put back together is for the pieces of governance and society to fit into an overall plan; for there to be some kind of national social glue that holds it together, and for there to be a direction that the country is able to choose to go. These three things are missing, largely because of the foreign agenda and foreign presence, and not really because of the Khmer.
Where is the plan to hold the society together?
The real role of governance is simple. It is about stabilizing the society over the long-term by planning how population, consumption, increasing productivity, and assets will all fit into a long-term vision and cultural logic.
If you keep population down, there's no pressure to destroy cultural or environmental resources. There are more of existing assets for everyone and any growth increases per-capita wealth (the real goal of development). If you want to turn the country into a giant urban zone that won't go to pieces, then you have to find a way to be uniquely productive once you stop copying all the foreign technology that generates quick (but artificial) growth and that ultimately has its limits.
Cambodia found out in the 1970s when it faced that limit at a time when foreign transfer of technology was stopped. Good governance is about organizing this plan, directing the actions that balance the consumption and population with growth, and protecting resources (the overall wealth). The functions of government are redistribution, protection, and promotion of the different resources to keep this balance.
In fact, you won't see a single report in Cambodia that actually has a sustainable development plan that follows these "Rio Principles" of making the country stable, and none of the foreign projects or Cambodian planning processes introduce this either.
The international community has substituted a different kind of planning that is closer to treating the country like a colony or a business, in place of sustainable development.
Their "development" plans are really five-year "investment plans" and they aren't about making communities wealthier and better planned. They are about generating productivity with foreign spending thrown into communities, with the goal of keeping "poverty" down.
These plans seem to be designed to temporarily control the poor and keep them from spreading (migrating). This is a poverty postponement agenda; postponement because the quick productivity gains from copying foreign technology and using foreign money will eventually be unable to keep up with the growing population and overuse of resources.
Most NGOs in Cambodia aren't helping the problem either. It is nice to help poor children, but it is much more important to STABILIZE their communities and their populations in their resource base, and to help people stop having children they can't feed or educate.
The majority of poor children will grow up to have more poor children because no one explains to them not to have them before they have saved enough money or developed the skills to care for them.
If this growing population can't produce to keep pace, they will eat the forests, sell the monuments, support developers who are taking the lands of the minorities in Ratanakkiri and elsewhere and destroy the remaining minority cultures. Once that land is full, they will either try to take land of other neighbors (not easy other than in Laos) or kill each other for something to eat in a civil war. This scenario repeats what happened in the 1970s when the inflow to the country of foreign technology that had fueled population and productivity for the previous century was stopped.
Unfortunately, national security in Asia has also come to mean population growth. Wars here are about throwing huge numbers of people across borders to swarm over land, the way the Vietnamese swarmed over much of Cambodia and the land of the Cham. Helping poor children now also helps to build these peasant armies of the future. Foreign projects create dependency and ratchet up the scale of the problem in the future, because they are treating symptoms and not caring to look at the problem of population and consumption or the context of what real "security" means beyond "more productivity and population."
So, why is there so much corruption and so little glue holding the society together?
Corruption is really about two things - it is about elites not wanting to contribute to the rest of their society because they feel disconnected with it and don't really believe in it; and it is about money and resources being subjected to no control, with nobody really having any responsibility for it or caring (or able) to impose controls.
A social bond between wealthy and poor requires that there be some kind of vision of a community or country as unique and stable. That is exactly the kind of vision that the foreign donor community has undermined by not encouraging any kind of stable development plans, by not allowing the country to have any choice over political vision other than the bleak "productivity," "investment" and "poverty alleviation" plans through export that the foreign donors have pushed as a united bloc, and by not showing any interest in the country for its own value or wealth.
The "investment" and "productivity" approach that foreign donors have introduced doesn't try to recreate any kinds of stable models that come out of the history of the peoples in the region. Instead, it is based on an exploitation of assets and people, based on what can be sold to foreigners in foreign dollars and measured in growth of these sales.
None of these projects ever measure value in terms of ASSETS per capita, rather than just sales value. If foreign projects entered communities and began to measure park space, historic treasures, environment, and other assets, and to ask people about the enjoyment they valued from these public goods, and to help people to live in systems that protected them rather than sought to turn them into something to sell to foreigners, Cambodians might think they had some value. But if the only value is on what can be sold to foreigners, or exploited so as to reduce poverty NOW, the message is that foreigners have no concern for the country's long-term and don't believe it has any long-term prospects.
That sends a message that it is best for everyone to secure their individual prospects, now, and sell off everything now that can be sold, while always preparing an escape plan for themselves or their children to leave. Of course it encourages corruption because the most secure winners in this game are those who sell off what they can get their hands on, rather than try to protect it for a common vision.
Bhutan, another Buddhist country, has a Gross National Happiness index instead of a Gross National Product. It restricts tourism and foreign contact. It protects its culture and it maintains a sense of community. It isn't paradise, but one can see the difference in its stability and culture.
Without starting with measures of assets, projects like Seila also do not measure what individuals are consuming, what they are saving and what they can contribute. In communities that are stable, people invest something in the common good and develop a stake in the common future and success. It's called tax policy. People are encouraged to invest in libraries, parks, universities, and mass transit, rather than private automobiles, or larger families, for example.
But projects like Seila don't do this. They just throw money into communities in the same way one might give a teenager a credit card. Moreover, it seems that the worse off the communities are, and the more private savings they squander, the more money they get. So, the real incentive is to waste the funds and to keep feeding off of more foreign help.
The Cambodia Daily wrote a story about corruption of World Bank assistance funds and quoted the lawyer of one of the accused, Mour Kimsan, making a wry comment. "The World Bank had approved all [$800,000] of expenditures, so if the embezzling charge . . . were true, World Bank officials should also be implicated." Who says one can't find a world class lawyer in Cambodia?
The foreign community seems to like it this way, too. It is almost as if they are in the poverty business in Cambodia; co-dependent on there being more symptoms to treat. Cambodia sells the image of being a post-conflict country that can't be stabilized. Foreigners do little to help stabilize it, thus perpetuating the image. Then, more funds roll in. Meanwhile, some people get very rich off the process; much as in the country in the 1950s and 1960s. It is a powder keg waiting to burn, and it will become its own self-fulfilling prophecy.
Where is the country's political system, to offer alternatives?
Unfortunately, the country's own political system seems to have been eviscerated. You can read the Cambodian newspapers about political parties but you won't read a thing about any party having any vision for the country. When politics is about personalities, it usually means that someone outside is controlling the agenda.
If Cambodians had choices, you might expect a few different visions to emerge. The 80 percent rural population, for example, might want to follow the Bhutanese example of slow growth and preservation. Or they might want to debate a different kind of fundamentalist and restorative vision that recreates some of the water and fishery systems that once made them the envy of Asia.
But you won't hear anyone promoting these models. The first one is disrupted by the foreign agenda that pays and "trains" local officials to keep their mouths shut about population growth and to just focus on "productivity" and international sales. The second one has been criminalized by the foreign community through the prosecution of Khmer Rouge leaders who used the same kinds of methods that everyone else in their country seemed to be using (violence) but who took it to excess and then fell out of power and ... got caught.
The urban population might want to follow the development of places like Singapore and Hong Kong, which invested heavily in education to develop something special in the region, that fit their comparative advantage. For the Khmer, that would probably be expertise in water engineering and everything associated with it (like fish farming); something that has been the culture's strength since the Fu Nan period and earlier, more than 2,000 years ago. Water management is the key to the future. But who is going to invest in this vision? Today, you can barely find praise of the Khmer's water engineering skills in any of the foreign-influenced school texts.
There's probably no politics because the vision has already been set from abroad. That vision seems to be that the Khmer's role in the world is limited to being servants for foreign tourists and producers of commodities for foreigners. When a country is just serving foreign masters and the agenda is already set, the only real debate is over who administers the agenda and who gets the spoils. That seems to be a holdover from the colonial past that foreign influences created. If this is the role that the international system creates for them, is it any wonder that officials just want to rip off that system? Wouldn't you?
Plenty is spent on putting the stones of Angkor back together to recreate temples that glorify the engineering reconstruction efforts and wealth of foreign donors, for foreigners to enjoy, and for Cambodians to see how far they have fallen. By comparison, so little is spent on putting pieces together of broken human systems in their wake.
* David Lempert, PhD, JD, MBA, ED (Hon), is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Khmer Studies in Siem Reap. He has been working as an international development consultant for the past 25 years.
I told them in simple terms: current approaches are contributing to destabilizing the country, to creating conditions for civil war, to impoverishing the country (in terms of per-capita ownership of national ASSETS), and to promoting corruption.
I don't think they heard me because they just kept asking what they could do to introduce more foreign capital and technology into Cambodia to make it more "productive."
I told them that Cambodia is like Humpty Dumpty - the royal egg that fell off a wall, 700 years ago and left scrambled eggs. What it needs to be put back together is for the pieces of governance and society to fit into an overall plan; for there to be some kind of national social glue that holds it together, and for there to be a direction that the country is able to choose to go. These three things are missing, largely because of the foreign agenda and foreign presence, and not really because of the Khmer.
Where is the plan to hold the society together?
The real role of governance is simple. It is about stabilizing the society over the long-term by planning how population, consumption, increasing productivity, and assets will all fit into a long-term vision and cultural logic.
If you keep population down, there's no pressure to destroy cultural or environmental resources. There are more of existing assets for everyone and any growth increases per-capita wealth (the real goal of development). If you want to turn the country into a giant urban zone that won't go to pieces, then you have to find a way to be uniquely productive once you stop copying all the foreign technology that generates quick (but artificial) growth and that ultimately has its limits.
Cambodia found out in the 1970s when it faced that limit at a time when foreign transfer of technology was stopped. Good governance is about organizing this plan, directing the actions that balance the consumption and population with growth, and protecting resources (the overall wealth). The functions of government are redistribution, protection, and promotion of the different resources to keep this balance.
In fact, you won't see a single report in Cambodia that actually has a sustainable development plan that follows these "Rio Principles" of making the country stable, and none of the foreign projects or Cambodian planning processes introduce this either.
The international community has substituted a different kind of planning that is closer to treating the country like a colony or a business, in place of sustainable development.
Their "development" plans are really five-year "investment plans" and they aren't about making communities wealthier and better planned. They are about generating productivity with foreign spending thrown into communities, with the goal of keeping "poverty" down.
These plans seem to be designed to temporarily control the poor and keep them from spreading (migrating). This is a poverty postponement agenda; postponement because the quick productivity gains from copying foreign technology and using foreign money will eventually be unable to keep up with the growing population and overuse of resources.
Most NGOs in Cambodia aren't helping the problem either. It is nice to help poor children, but it is much more important to STABILIZE their communities and their populations in their resource base, and to help people stop having children they can't feed or educate.
The majority of poor children will grow up to have more poor children because no one explains to them not to have them before they have saved enough money or developed the skills to care for them.
If this growing population can't produce to keep pace, they will eat the forests, sell the monuments, support developers who are taking the lands of the minorities in Ratanakkiri and elsewhere and destroy the remaining minority cultures. Once that land is full, they will either try to take land of other neighbors (not easy other than in Laos) or kill each other for something to eat in a civil war. This scenario repeats what happened in the 1970s when the inflow to the country of foreign technology that had fueled population and productivity for the previous century was stopped.
Unfortunately, national security in Asia has also come to mean population growth. Wars here are about throwing huge numbers of people across borders to swarm over land, the way the Vietnamese swarmed over much of Cambodia and the land of the Cham. Helping poor children now also helps to build these peasant armies of the future. Foreign projects create dependency and ratchet up the scale of the problem in the future, because they are treating symptoms and not caring to look at the problem of population and consumption or the context of what real "security" means beyond "more productivity and population."
So, why is there so much corruption and so little glue holding the society together?
Corruption is really about two things - it is about elites not wanting to contribute to the rest of their society because they feel disconnected with it and don't really believe in it; and it is about money and resources being subjected to no control, with nobody really having any responsibility for it or caring (or able) to impose controls.
A social bond between wealthy and poor requires that there be some kind of vision of a community or country as unique and stable. That is exactly the kind of vision that the foreign donor community has undermined by not encouraging any kind of stable development plans, by not allowing the country to have any choice over political vision other than the bleak "productivity," "investment" and "poverty alleviation" plans through export that the foreign donors have pushed as a united bloc, and by not showing any interest in the country for its own value or wealth.
The "investment" and "productivity" approach that foreign donors have introduced doesn't try to recreate any kinds of stable models that come out of the history of the peoples in the region. Instead, it is based on an exploitation of assets and people, based on what can be sold to foreigners in foreign dollars and measured in growth of these sales.
None of these projects ever measure value in terms of ASSETS per capita, rather than just sales value. If foreign projects entered communities and began to measure park space, historic treasures, environment, and other assets, and to ask people about the enjoyment they valued from these public goods, and to help people to live in systems that protected them rather than sought to turn them into something to sell to foreigners, Cambodians might think they had some value. But if the only value is on what can be sold to foreigners, or exploited so as to reduce poverty NOW, the message is that foreigners have no concern for the country's long-term and don't believe it has any long-term prospects.
That sends a message that it is best for everyone to secure their individual prospects, now, and sell off everything now that can be sold, while always preparing an escape plan for themselves or their children to leave. Of course it encourages corruption because the most secure winners in this game are those who sell off what they can get their hands on, rather than try to protect it for a common vision.
Bhutan, another Buddhist country, has a Gross National Happiness index instead of a Gross National Product. It restricts tourism and foreign contact. It protects its culture and it maintains a sense of community. It isn't paradise, but one can see the difference in its stability and culture.
Without starting with measures of assets, projects like Seila also do not measure what individuals are consuming, what they are saving and what they can contribute. In communities that are stable, people invest something in the common good and develop a stake in the common future and success. It's called tax policy. People are encouraged to invest in libraries, parks, universities, and mass transit, rather than private automobiles, or larger families, for example.
But projects like Seila don't do this. They just throw money into communities in the same way one might give a teenager a credit card. Moreover, it seems that the worse off the communities are, and the more private savings they squander, the more money they get. So, the real incentive is to waste the funds and to keep feeding off of more foreign help.
The Cambodia Daily wrote a story about corruption of World Bank assistance funds and quoted the lawyer of one of the accused, Mour Kimsan, making a wry comment. "The World Bank had approved all [$800,000] of expenditures, so if the embezzling charge . . . were true, World Bank officials should also be implicated." Who says one can't find a world class lawyer in Cambodia?
The foreign community seems to like it this way, too. It is almost as if they are in the poverty business in Cambodia; co-dependent on there being more symptoms to treat. Cambodia sells the image of being a post-conflict country that can't be stabilized. Foreigners do little to help stabilize it, thus perpetuating the image. Then, more funds roll in. Meanwhile, some people get very rich off the process; much as in the country in the 1950s and 1960s. It is a powder keg waiting to burn, and it will become its own self-fulfilling prophecy.
Where is the country's political system, to offer alternatives?
Unfortunately, the country's own political system seems to have been eviscerated. You can read the Cambodian newspapers about political parties but you won't read a thing about any party having any vision for the country. When politics is about personalities, it usually means that someone outside is controlling the agenda.
If Cambodians had choices, you might expect a few different visions to emerge. The 80 percent rural population, for example, might want to follow the Bhutanese example of slow growth and preservation. Or they might want to debate a different kind of fundamentalist and restorative vision that recreates some of the water and fishery systems that once made them the envy of Asia.
But you won't hear anyone promoting these models. The first one is disrupted by the foreign agenda that pays and "trains" local officials to keep their mouths shut about population growth and to just focus on "productivity" and international sales. The second one has been criminalized by the foreign community through the prosecution of Khmer Rouge leaders who used the same kinds of methods that everyone else in their country seemed to be using (violence) but who took it to excess and then fell out of power and ... got caught.
The urban population might want to follow the development of places like Singapore and Hong Kong, which invested heavily in education to develop something special in the region, that fit their comparative advantage. For the Khmer, that would probably be expertise in water engineering and everything associated with it (like fish farming); something that has been the culture's strength since the Fu Nan period and earlier, more than 2,000 years ago. Water management is the key to the future. But who is going to invest in this vision? Today, you can barely find praise of the Khmer's water engineering skills in any of the foreign-influenced school texts.
There's probably no politics because the vision has already been set from abroad. That vision seems to be that the Khmer's role in the world is limited to being servants for foreign tourists and producers of commodities for foreigners. When a country is just serving foreign masters and the agenda is already set, the only real debate is over who administers the agenda and who gets the spoils. That seems to be a holdover from the colonial past that foreign influences created. If this is the role that the international system creates for them, is it any wonder that officials just want to rip off that system? Wouldn't you?
Plenty is spent on putting the stones of Angkor back together to recreate temples that glorify the engineering reconstruction efforts and wealth of foreign donors, for foreigners to enjoy, and for Cambodians to see how far they have fallen. By comparison, so little is spent on putting pieces together of broken human systems in their wake.
* David Lempert, PhD, JD, MBA, ED (Hon), is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Khmer Studies in Siem Reap. He has been working as an international development consultant for the past 25 years.
10 comments:
Dear donors
You must know that the CPP politicians are very clever in translating the English word " Good governance" in khmer.
They use the Khmer word
" Aphibal-kech" which means " Supervision"...
This is a deliberated confused,
a misleading word...for the CPP's benefit.
It takes a foreigner like Mr.David Lempert to see through the smoke of how these foreign donors, United Nations, and the Asian development Bank,the NGOs and the Chinese and the Viet and the CPP clans are using Cambodia as their playground!!
I say enough is enough! It is so true! Every goods and services in Cambodia are for all the foreigners to enjoy while dirt poor Cambodian people continue to work like slave and still have nothing for their future!!!
Mr. David Lempert was sent by God to Cambodia to warn all those corrupted people and if they don't listen, they will all die in hell!!!!!!!!!!!!
We need to amplify this Dr. Lempert's idea to the commoner so they can understand the terms. Is there any volunteers out there or forum? Lets get our ideas together to help and find a solution to Cambodia's problem. It is about time we do something, maybe the New Year's Resolution to bring about change. To those viewing or posting this comment, I challenge you to interpret Dr. Lembert's work into Khmer and post it on the web and on your sites. Spread this knowledge all the way to Kampuchea! SO that Kampucheans all over the world and in Kampuchea can think of CHANGE and REVOLUTION.
^ Your idea is a good one. Why not post in Khmer? Do those in Kampuchea have internet? No, the farmers in our country do not read english and they do not even have electricity! We must put this in the news or RFA through radio broadcast. I will try my best to give this news to RFA and give an interview to Dr. Lembert and broadcast his interview in Khmer.
Everyone out there discuss and tell people about his views!
Water engineering? HOW BRILLIANT!!! Fish Farming?? AGRICULTURAL CHANGE? Yes Cambodia is the richest country in SOUTH EAST ASIA. We are a green country full of food and prosperous RICE and FISH. BUT WHERE IS IT ALL GOING? WHY DO PEOPLE STARVE if our country is this rich? We are being sucked out of our wealth and resources from people who want our wealth. Just as Dr. Lembert has said, the international community is only looking forward to their own well being. What of Cambodia's direction? They do not care! It is up to us and our compatriots to bring about change.
Water engineering? HOW BRILLIANT!!! Fish Farming?? AGRICULTURAL CHANGE? Yes Cambodia is the richest country in SOUTH EAST ASIA. We are a green country full of food and prosperous RICE and FISH. BUT WHERE IS IT ALL GOING? WHY DO PEOPLE STARVE if our country is this rich? We are being sucked out of our wealth and resources from people who want our wealth. Just as Dr. Lembert has said, the international community is only looking forward to their own well being. What of Cambodia's direction? They do not care! It is up to us and our compatriots to bring about change.
We keep pointing fingers to foreigners and Vietnam and Thailand. It is true that they are controlling us and taking all of our land and riches. But we must look to our own problem for now which is the Cambodian government! Corruption is rampant and they are being paid to betray Pra Chea Chun and their country. We must blame our current leaders who are nothing but gangsters and low lifes! They cannot lead nor think ahead of Cambodia currently.
Lets reveal the corruption of these people!! Down play them and bring them to justice for their political mass murder and leeching of the peoples wealth.
Foreign agenda is taking lands away from the people and putting money into the pockets of the rich who dominate the current administration. The division between rich and poor is very large. With the majority of people living in slums and being pushed off their land, this will no doubt create tensions. Civil War is eminent if the government continues to do what it is doing.
CPP is creating an atmosphere of tension with the 2008 elections coming up. There is even fear of a coup in Hun Sen's mind. Political violence is no way to handle the people who are living in poverty.
In one of Sam Rainsy's campaign videos he is seen to be on the people's side, but is he also on the side of law and development?
I believe that the government of Cambodia must organize itself in accordance to those who are being pushed off their lands and learn to deal with them in a lawful manner. Using the police or army to kill and harm the people is no way for a peaceful outcome.
Theres really no rule of law or real enforcement in Srok Khmer. The police work with the criminals just to make money.
Cambodia need new leaders to create laws, checks and balances, and parliment to adhere to these laws.
Using force will only end in force.
CIVIL WAR IS BADLY NEEDED IN CAMBODIA....
AND WHO IS GOING TO OVERTHROW HUN SEN?. SADDAM WAS KICKED OUT BY THE US NOT BY THEIR OWN PEOPLE, OTHERWISE HE REMAINS AS STRONGMAN FOR LIFE LIKE HUN SEN! THE WEAK FREAK PUSSYCAT SAM RAINSY WILL NOT AND CANNOT DO A DAMN THING 'TILL HE DIES. AND IT IS NOT IN THE USA INTEREST TO KICK HUN SEN OUT! THIS IS OUR BUSINESS ALL CAMBODIANS MUST RAISE UP PEOPLE REVOLUTION, WHICH HUN SEN FEAR THE MOST(LISTEN TO HIS SPEECH CAREFULLY). ONLY 'TILL A BRAVE LEADER COMES OUT AND START REVOLUTION HUN SEN WILL RULE FOREVER! NOBODY LIKES WAR BUT WHEN IT NEEDS TO BE DONE IT GETS TO BE DONE. IT COULD TAKE AS LONG AS TEN YEARS BUT TIME IS ON PEOPLE SIDE. IF WE ARE AFRAID CREATING WAR BECAUSE OF THE PAST(AND HUN SEN KNOWS THAT! THAT'S WHY HE DOES WHAT HE WANTS AND HE'S SO DEFIANT) THEN STOP CRYING AND LET HIM RULE FOREVER. YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE!
All these posts, I guess by khmers are worryingly xenophobic.
It is not foreigners stealing the land.
It is your OWN GOVERNMENT.
Honestly, there is nothing in Cambodia for foreigners to steal. They don't give a shit. The only thing worth stealing in cambodia are the foreign NGO donations.
It is YOUR OWN, CORRUPT GOVERNEMENT that is stealing from you. They are blaming foreigners in all the newspapers, in order to divert attention away from THEMSELVES.
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