Now we are successful and developed! Improvement and impasse in two cambodian community development interventions

Abstract

This research explores whether community development interventions led by non-government organisations in rural Cambodia produce their intended opportunities for empowerment, or reproduce the powerlessness that is characteristic of poverty. I engage this question by examining how participants perceive, negotiate and use the knowledge that community intervention delivers, the village organisations that intervention creates, and the labour that participation entails. These dynamics are explored in an ethnographic study of two community interventions implemented by Cambodian non-government organisations in different rural settings, one in the country's southeast and the other in the northeast. I argue that despite the multiple failings of international development intervention in Cambodia, positive impacts do emerge. Participants in community development incorporate interventions into their daily lives in unexpected ways, turning them to ends that are relevant to the task of improving life. This process is uncertain, contested and vulnerable, but nonetheless provides evidence to support Kabeer's (1999, 2011) argument that participation can be conceptualised as empowering, because it can challenge existing conditions, and can enhance participants' ability to realise fundamental choices and aspirations, particularly by women. However, this research also demonstrates that empowerment is limited by persistent inequalities within communities, between people and the state, and between communities and implementing agencies, as well as by the unpredictable impacts of Cambodia's regional and international integration. In substantiating this claim, the thesis explores how knowledge is delivered and used in two rural settings (Chapter Five), how village organisations created by non-government organisations relate to existing community reciprocities, inequalities and governance structures (Chapter Six), and how gendered participation is negotiated within households, focusing on microcredit (Chapter Seven). Chapter Eight considers the impact of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-8 in southeastern Cambodia, and proposed Mekong dams in the northeast, drawing attention to the threats to empowerment that prevail in these two rural contexts.