Tin Sokhavuth
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and with help from the United Nations, Cambodia has been switching its government paradigm from the very centralized government – a la people’s democratic government – to a decentralized form of government, under the hood of constitutional monarchy.
To tackle this problem, the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC), in cooperation with many stakeholders such as the World Bank (WB), Asian Development Bank (ADB), United Nation Development Program (UNDP) and donor countries have been conceptualizing a working plan, the so-called “Rectangular Strategy” in order to develop and reform the country.
For this development program, the RGC has allowed all stakeholders to directly participate in developing Cambodia in all fields under the slogan of “Partnership in Development.” In other words, all partners in development could recruit their own team and use their own money from their own government to go into the field to start any projects they want with local people and/or local government.
For this reason, the ADB made its own development program in parallel with the RGC’s “Rectangular Strategy”, the so called “Country Partnership Strategy 2014-2018” in an attempt to reduce poverty and vulnerability in Cambodia.
As part of this plan, public service reform is one of the main pillars for the ADB to make public service delivery more efficient.
For ADB, in Cambodia, the quality of service delivery is limited and the public expenditure is not efficient. However, there are “modest improvements in fiscal revenue collection but lax financial management systems.”
Still, the administrative processes within the public sector are too complex, and the functions of the agencies and/or ministries unclear to the point where, sometime these functions are overlapping. As a result of this overlap, people often don’t know to which institution they have to visit to do paperwrk.
In its Country Partnership Strategy 2014-2018, the ADB stated that the “low productivity of civil servants” is due to low salaries and inefficient human resource. This could be also understood as meaning the low salaries are the main cause of corrupt practice in many agencies and/or ministries where civil servants often talk about “butter office” – the office in which they could make a lot of money by using corrupt practice.
The ADB added that the recruitment and promotion of civil servants are increasingly merit-based, despite the practice of bribery and nepotism at their “butter office” posts. Despite this, the functioning and organization of the civil service system is largely based on patronage system in which the president’s power is in part due to his strong connection with high-ranking government officials.
With the help from the European Community, especially France, the RGC has been setting up a policy to decentralize its central power. The main goal of this reform is to yield some decision-making power to local government.
While the policy of decentralization seems to be successful in South Korea, the ADB pointed out that in Cambodia the regulatory framework of this decentralized system still lacks the definition of roles and responsibilities of the local administrations.
Since 2008, the RGC has made efforts to reform public service delivery by centering on three main points: (i) public financial management reforms, (ii) decentralization and de-concentration reforms, and (iii) public administration reforms. The critical goal of the RGC to improve public service delivery in all levels of government is to improve the efficiency and transparency of the public financial management systems.
As for the ADB, the reform of the public administration could lead to a better development and/or expansion of the private sector; the corrupt and inefficient practices could be also eliminated. If successful, this reform will help to reduce poverty by increasing local economic development that, in turn, will create jobs for local people.
In sum, the ADB added that although the public service delivery reform in Cambodia has been slow, but steady, some “progress has been achieved in decentralization and de-concentration reform.”
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