Key Issues in Local Governance

Cambodia is still struggling to overcome serious challenges arising from weak governance, a nascent civil society, limited human resources, wide income disparities and poor economic policies. While there has been some economic growth, the benefits of growth have been captured largely by the urban populations. The key issues of this situation include:


Democratic representation: the role of councils at provincial/city, district/khan and commune/sangkat administrations is still limitation to establish effectively in accordance with the principles of democracy by expanding their powers, duties, responsibilities and resources. Additionally, councils have less knowledge and understanding on decentralization and de-concentration reforms of strategic framework of government.

Participation of the people: poor systems and procedures as ensure that people, especially women, vulnerable groups and indigenous minorities can participate in decision-making at provincial/city, district/khan and commune/sangkat levels. Actually, people rarely participate in development planning process; except CIP development process but it is still less participation. So, mostly the issues and needs of communities were not responded and resolved because of council’s capacity to promote people in CIP development process. Other hand, councils do not active to mobilize stakeholders to support their project; more over they misunderstand, especially they do not active cooperation with NGOs because of considering as anti-party or disturbing/competing with them. So it makes the gape largely because of communication and cooperation between council and CBOs.

Public sector accountability: less accountability at all levels of administration and facilitate citizen’s oversight of the administration and financial affairs of those administrations. Actually, councils never organize public forum to disseminate about the planning and budgeting to people.

Effectiveness: the public services are so far to citizens to participate in planning and monitoring public services in order to meet local needs and priorities. Predictably, issues and needs of communities are rarely approved or/and supported to take into planning by councils; furthermore the local development projects also have low quality because of council’s capacities on monitoring and evaluation inadequate and high-quality service providers.

Gender: Cambodia Gender empowerment measure is among the lowest in Asia, reflecting the extremely low representation of women in government, parliament, judiciary and at the commune and village levels. Social, legal and political institutions as well as norm perpetuate gender discrimination and vulnerability, including the incidence of gender-based violence (trafficking, domestic violence, rape and sexual exploitation), the transmission of HIV as well as the reported increase in the number of women and children trafficked into neighboring countries. Additionally, in rural, women farmers have limited opportunities to participate in training and exchange activities, largely because of the poor application of genuine participatory approach and gender mainstreaming in agricultural extension – both by Government and other provider.

Natural Resource Degradation: Although the Councils recognized the CBO, a gap between knowledge and understanding continued to exist. Communication and cooperation was still limited. Actually, the community had less voice in the local government - many cases of illegal fishing and natural resource occurred without prevention, there was less participation in the prevention and less communication and cooperation occurred between the existing CBOs and councils. In addition, the community had no representatives to present issues on behalf of the community to the councils to promote greater natural resource management.