The conventional wisdom or at least the mainstream media narrative would be that the Cambodian government is so corrupt, and has destroyed the whole forest coverage just for personal gains, and the deforestation has been the major cause of flood and drought in Cambodia.
That is the story we normally hear.
Such narrative creates the perception of “presumed guilt” towards the government, and thus environmental cooperation with Cambodian government tends to focus on investigative reporting of forest crimes and accountability issues rather than on the long-term solutions to Cambodia’s environmental problem as a whole. This tendency also adopts a narrow definition of “environmental issues” in Cambodia, which are deliberately being confined to merely “deforestation issues”.
This tendency can be clearly understood by looking at the long list of foreign NGOs funded by foreign embassies who deal with environment issues. The disturbing fact is that most of the staff, including foreign personnel and experts, are not professional ecologists and environmental scientists but rather advocacy activists and human right activists.
Rather than being technical and scientific, the approach is superficial because basically everyone, with the assistance of social media, can undertake this advocacy roles that are attractive to sensationalism and public emotions.
This approach is not productive because it assumes that the government is doing nothing to curb the crimes. It does not help or encourage local authorities who have limited capacity and resources to deal with the issues, but it rather projects that local authorities are accomplice of the crime.
Like the stories of child labor or human trafficking, instead of reporting to local authorities concerned for solution, some NGOs opt for media outcry and make direct report to their funders so that they can compile an annual report to project a grim image of the specific issue.
While this approach can benefit trust from the funders to those investigative NGOs, justify the rationale of the donors’ assistance, and thus secure the funding sustainability, this approach has caused a huge trust deficit between stakeholders concerned who are supposed to cooperate and assist each other to address the big issues of environment, which of course are not limited to deforestation alone.
Considering the size of Cambodian forest, a simple math can tell that one ranger needs to take care of 5,714 hectares of forest, which is simply impossible. If we are to dwell into accountability issue alone, then every ranger will be guilty for failing to be a “superman” to protect Cambodian forest.
Activists and rangers alone cannot protect Cambodian forest, and sticking to this limited approach will only make people feel hopeless, exhausted and distrustful.
There should be three levels of solutions to environmental issues.
The first level is the advocacy approach, which is being dealt with right now by overwhelming NGOs who are not necessarily scientists or ecologists. In fact, beyond the deforestation issues, Cambodian environmental issues should be treated and approached in multi-dimensional manners based on scientific and technical facts and solutions. Unfortunately, most NGOs are still mixed up technicalities with political heroism.
They tend to monopolise the love of environment to the orchestrated “marginalised heroic activists”.
Therefore, government, NGOs and development partners should move up their partnership to the next level of solutions.
The second level of solutions should focus on two key components, “sustainability of localised solution” and “livelihood of the people”. Only local Cambodian people can sustainably protect Cambodian forest. Assistance should focus on enhancing their capacity to protect the forest, and providing ways and means for rangers and local people to protect the forest.
Loving the forest alone is not enough. People needs to feed their stomach too. If they have sustainable job and income, they would stop wandering in the forest, risking their lives due to landmines danger or risking arrests due to law violations. The “livelihood of the people” here does not refer to cash-handouts by NGOs and donors because they are not sustainable. It refers to creation of sustainable local jobs for local incomes in those areas. As raised below, the income from sale of carbon credit can also be a long-term solution to the livelihood issues.
