Social accountability in Cambodia
Good governance is at the heart of the Cambodian Government’s Rectangular Strategy and is highlighted as a requirement for the country to achieve poverty reduction and sustainable development. Achieving good governance, however, requires that the institutions that guarantee accountability and transparency become effective.
Social accountability is based on three key relationships: between citizens and the state; between elected officials and those employed to deliver services; and between those employed to deliver services and the citizens who receive and consume them.
Cambodia today is characterized by weak accountability and rife corruption as well as poor enforcement of the rule of law. The highly centralized nature of the Cambodian state reduces the ability of citizens to influence issues that directly affect their lives. The distance between local protest and national government is vast.
Members of parliament tend to act with little independence, voting along party lines. Parliament does not constitute a strong check on the power of the executive. At the local government level the commune councils stem from authorities devised s a local arm of central government and display little scope to report upwards. Public confidence in judicial process is close to zero, and the Government appears unwilling to honor neutrality in the judicial system.
This report, written for the World Bank and the United Kingdom Department for international Development (DFID), focuses on identifying and assessing opportunities in Cambodia to strengthen accountability by enhancing bottom-up or external mechanisms of accountability through civil society groups, the media, and parliament, among others. It aims to assess the capacity and interest of Cambodian civil society organizations in promoting accountability and transparency; and to assess the legal and administrative environment. And it endeavors to ascertain the operational entry-points for such activities in Cambodia and present donors, particularly the DFID and the Bank, with option for possible programs.
NGOs and other civil society bodies believe that donors are able to exert more influence on the Government than they can. Donors have a critical role in listening to and channeling information from civil groups to the Government, but also in strengthening the interaction of civil society, citizens and government so that in the long term donors become peripheral.
Civil society is gradually galvanizing at a local level. But local or national structures through which issues can be raised remain weak. Much donor involvement lends itself to accountability initiatives. In many sectors, work is going on already, including gradual development of grassroots structures, local committees, civil society networks, research bodies, media awareness, entry points into national government, and civil engagement in common donor planning. This provides a basis for action.
Key next steps for the DFID and the World Bank include building joint or internal resources to promote social accountability through sectoral or policy-based work, build links with civil bodies, and set up good practices for donors to follow. Further donor collaboration would help strengthen the power of civil groups to raise issues with the Government. Some civil involvement might be possible through a common donor framework, within one sector or more widely. It could be linked to more accessible donor working group processes, or facilitated through a common resource center.
Donors could also provide support to civil bodies more directly, taking account of existing programs and expertise and the difficulties involved in providing external resources to emerging civil groups.
Though the judicial system does not provide a channel, legal frameworks do provide a basis for taking issues up through other channels: to donors, though popular protest, directly to senior figures including the King and the Prime Minister, or to news media. Positive pro-poor laws are a valuable tool for civil society even in the absence of a functioning judiciary. International and ideally national law form bases for reasoned and justified social action. Forthcoming examples include a Freedom of Information Law, and Anti-Corruption Law, laws on rights to protest and laws on broadcast media.
(Source: World Bank Group in Cambodia: Working for a Cambodia Free of Poverty, 2005)