Women’s leadership is necessary for Cambodia’s sustained development. Their involvement in leadership roles in the public sphere and politics is crucial and has been shown to impact positively on poverty reduction. Governments, NGOs and international organisations have been increasingly aware that sustainable development is significantly linked to gender equality  and women’s empowerment, key factors in ending extreme poverty. It is only logical then that  Cambodia should pay greater attention to developing future generations of women for leadership, especially at the […]

Decentralisation has been pursued as a mechanism to strengthen local democracy and enhance service delivery within local government. There are high expectations that its promises can be realised through local citizens’ engagement in local decision-making processes that deal specifically with issues of local importance. Instituting local-level participatory processes empowers citizens and communities to voice their opinions on local issues, demand responses from local governments, and hold local authorities accountable for the decisions they make. Through devolution of power and resources […]

Gender issues have become a part of mainstream Cambodian politics over the last decade, and gender-neutral electoral systems have been developed in cooperation between donors and government. Female representation has been achieved primarily through direct and indirect elections at different levels. And although Cambodia is a male-dominated culture in a patrimonial society, attention has turned to attracting female voters, and the strategic importance of female leaders and role models is being slowly realised. Predictably, driven by popular demand, gender issues have become a part of mainstream […]

Several authors (particularly Laundau 2008; Henke 2011) label Cambodian national civil society as a sphere that is neither apolitical nor autonomous, but influenced or co-opted by and blurred with the state. They posit that a Gramscian perspective is relevant to interpreting civil society in the country. This article suggests that the application of a Gramscian perspective also proves relevant to sub-national civil society in Cambodia. The sub-national state has recently politicised and co-opted village development committees and imposed restrictions on […]

The district and provincial council elections in May 2009, for the first time, offered communes the opportunity to choose councillors from whom they can demand accountability, and introduced a new relationship between commune councillors and higher councils. The main goal of this survey is to gauge the view of commune and district councillors and district boards of governors on accountability, fiscal assignment, service delivery, division of labour between the commune and district, gender issues, unified administration and the reform in […]