Thoughts on NGOs in Cambodia

Perhaps you've already read this article from Slate: Silence of the Lambs
For do-gooder NGOs in Cambodia, accommodation with the regime is very profitable

I have a lot of opinions on this article, though they're not necessarily all Cambodia-specific. Rather than leave some rambling spew in the comments section I thought I'd get up on my soapbox here at home.

First, I think that the author is right to approach NGOs with skepticism, particularly where he writes, "People should bring the same degree of scrutiny to NGOs as they do to corporations and governments " and quotes an Action Aid report's criticism, saying, "Instead of transferring skills to Cambodian staff, their time is spent writing reports or doing jobs which they should be training local staff to carry out." These are both excellent points that need to be made more frequently in the dialogue about foreign aid.

Of course any organization should be held accountable, particularly when working with marginalized people, sensitive environmental situations, under shaky/corrupt governmental conditions, etc. NGOs are just as prone as the rest of us to retreat into a cloud of buzz-words. Just as we deride the corporations in movies and our lives for talking about how all their "team players" contribute to "synergy" by putting those cover sheets on the TPS reports, terms like "gender empowerment" or "sustainable livelihoods" can be used so often they come across as meaningless unless they're backed up by very specific examples, actions, and/or programs. But let's face it, we all do that sort of thing nowadays -- it's a symptom of the disease of euphemism in our modern society. We want to hide what we really do, out of fear it is insignificant or meaningless. If it sounds good, whether it is "strategic thinking sessions" at conferences or "positive team player" on our resumés, it makes us feel good and reassures us that the work we're doing is important, not insignificant. Heaven forfend we spend parts of our lives doing something that doesn't really matter. (A photographic thought on that point.)

Though pointed and well intentioned in the beginning, I find the rest of the article to be a bit sloppy in its criticism.

I bristled at the characterization of a 2007 Conservation International scientific expedition to catalogue biodiversity as "15 days merrily traipsing about while cataloging species of ants and katydids." (Note, the bolded emphasis is mine, but in the original article these are the words selected from the sentence to carry they now-defunct hyperlink to CI's page on the report.) Apparently scientists never take their work seriously and scouring the wilderness of a national park searching for new species of animals less than a centimeter in size is just a merry holiday!

Or like getting dispatched to an island to monitor the biodiversity of coral reefs, except -- oops! -- "they spent a large part of their time snorkeling with a local diving company"! So all scientists shouldn't be trusted to measure the things they've spent years studying, like the natural environment. Also, don't even think about strapping on that mask and those fins to check out the reef health. You should just peer over the side of a boat as the local fishermen do when they drop dynamite in the water to catch fish.

That is not in any way to suggest or justify that the needs of the local communities shouldn't be considered. Seriously. In fact, it underscores what the real issue is in the example with Koh Rung Sangleum: land rights. If the government cared about the locals' livelihoods, it would have opened a forum with them or called an NGO that deals with livelihoods and land rights. They made a clever move by asking an NGO that specializes in biodiversity (FFI) to make the assessment, which then gives their sale of the villagers' land the veneer of credibility because, hey, an NGO said it was ok! The NGO still isn't in a good position in this whole transaction, but shouldn't take all the blame for it.

The root of most of the situations that the author is critical of is a legal one: land rights in Cambodia are a freakin' mess. Lonely Girl Travels sums it up well in one of her several entries on Phnom Penh:

Land rights are a huge issue in Cambodia. And like so many of the country’s problems, it comes out of the war: after the Khmer Rouge fell, no one had property deeds—you just moved into any available space you found. It was a clusterfuck of a situation. Ten years ago, the government began an official campaign to get people proper titles to the land they’d been living in since the KR. But it was a muddled, mismanaged process in which poor folks largely lost out. As a result, a lot of the country’s residents still don’t have official claim to the land they’ve been living on.

It’s the perfect situation for exploitation.

I'm going to let the rest of the individual examples slide, and be content with feeling grumpy over the author's clear lack of experience with scientists. The rest of the examples of mismanaged NGO efforts are more of an inconsistent hodge podge of actions by different groups, that all really only have the label NGO in common. They should care about biodiversity! Except that then they didn't care about livelihoods, because now the villagers have to cater to eco tourists. And now in this other situation the villagers have no jobs because biodiversity is being preserved! Shame on you, NGOs!

Next point: Yes, corruption is bad. But in a country as corrupt as Cambodia (recently ranked 154 in the world by Transparency International), sometimes the cooperation (or blind eye) of the government is essential to getting something accomplished. Is it ideal? No. Is it reality? Absolutely. So what do you do? Dither about morality and do nothing or try and get some form of rapport (not to mention legitimacy) going with a government agency to make some sort of progress?

Again, the opening premise of the article is a noble one, but the piece is too long and lapses into a jumbled diatribe of cynical sensationalism. (Sigh, and I told myself I wasn't going to get that worked up about one stupid article on the internet...) The author concedes that there are good NGOs out there, names four at which he has friends, and then proceeds to paint all remaining organizations working in the country with broad, critical brush strokes charging everything from ineffectiveness to outright slavery ("some [villagers] told the Post they felt 'trapped in a state of indentured servitude'"). If I were his editor, I'd whip out my red pen like a high school teacher and scribble, Need to do a little more research, hm?

Lastly, while we should absolutely approach aid skeptically and realistically, that does not mean we need to approach it cynically, which I fear is what the overriding emotional message of the piece is. One of the best concerts I've been to was Billy Bragg at The Great American Music Hall in October of 2010. In addition to the great songs there was his charming and intelligent banter in between them. A point he made that has stuck with me since was not to give in to cynicism. It's true, he pointed out, there are still problems in the world and some of the things we've been working hardest against haven't budged. But are making progress in some areas and we have to remember that to give ourselves hope. Because if we just give up and accept a cynical view of everything that tells us we are powerless, then they have won. All the governments, all the corporations, all the things we are fighting, they want us to give in to cynicism and give up. And we can never do that.

My last beef is with the picture they use to illustrate the article. I did leave a comment on Slate about that, so I'll save myself some typing and just let it speak for itself:

Setting my other opinions about the article aside, I, too, am puzzled with the decision to include the rugby picture to illustrate this article... Not sure if it was the author's or editors' choice or what. I'm involved with the rugby here in Cambodia and, as [another commenter] said earlier, the people who run it do so in their spare time. Not only that, but the emphasis is on training and developing the local players to be coaches and referees.

The NGO shown in the picture is PSE (Pour un Sourire d'Enfant), and it actually is a pretty good organization; I know some people who work with the school, but it also passes the criticisms the author sets out in his article. From the PSE website:

"One of the chief priorities of PSE was to make the team, which worked at the grass roots, completely Khmer. The Cambodians must be the real performers in their country's development; it is the request of the Cambodian government, the wish of the founders and the assurance of the permanence of the programmes. Today, the management team is 100% Khmer."

(More can be found here.)

Anyway, if the argument is 'Yes, some NGOs do good work BUT the careless ones should be accountable' then it would behoove the publishers to do a little more research before slapping any old picture from Cambodia on an article. (I fear by writing this I've just gotten some poor unpaid intern sacked...)

Enough ranting from me! I'll update you on what's been happening IRL soon.

UPDATE (6/24) with more grumpy thoughts:
The article takes issue with "NGO workers [who] represent a privileged caste, isolated and detached from the people who serve as the objects of their benevolence." The Westerners and foreigners I've met here have been pretty evenly spread between NGO workers, consulate/embassy staff, businesspeople (working for both foreign firms and their own domestic ones), and English teachers. It's impossible to know, unless you engage someone in conversation, what they do exactly and whether or not they belong to this supposed "privileged caste." This is what I imagine happening: the author, sitting in a café in town or perhaps walking around, sees one of the many marauding Lexus SUVs in town speed past and grumbles to himself, "There goes another fatcat NGO worker" when it's really probably just my boss and his family. Do you really know if the well-heeled woman climbing out of a car is an NGO worker? Perhaps she runs her own interior design boutique here, is a teacher at one of the international schools, works for a successful Korean bank, or is simply married to someone at an embassy. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one to defend extreme wealth or class differences. But if you're going to call out the wealthy foreigners in a country don't assume they all work for NGOs; decry the foreign capitalists too, whose business actions lead more directly to the degradation and subservience of developing countries than the NGOs who say they're fighting them.

The more I read it the more the article just reeks of thoughtlessness and hasty journalism.