In this article, we analyze the politics of natural resource use and its implications
for economic development and democracy in Cambodia, examining three
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sectors—forests, land, and oil—to construct three broad arguments. First, existing
weak social and political institutions allow the elite to exploit the country’s natural
resources for political gain. Second, although the exploitation of forestry resources
(i.e., logging) was used to cement elite pacts and promote peace and political stability,
land more recently was used to extend elite patronage to mass patronage in
order to maintain hybrid democracy.1 Third, future oil revenue will clearly promote
overall economic growth; however, if current trends—weak countervailing
social forces, weak political institutions, and corruption—persist, the benefits of
such growth will certainly be inequitably distributed. Further, oil revenue will be
used to perpetuate Cambodia’s hybrid democracy, stalling any further democratic
consolidation.
To flesh out these arguments, this article is divided into three parts. The first
section documents existing social and political institutions, arguing that
(1) the
government strategically keeps government oversight institutions weak, and
(2)
civil society organizations face internal weakness or are co-opted by the government
so as to prevent the emergence of a countervailing force to the state. The
second section examines ways in which forests and land resources have been
employed primarily to maintain elite pacts and promote peace and stability and
subsequently to foment a hybrid democracy. These patterns of resource exploitation,
which were first employed by the military and then by business tycoons, had
negative effects on economic equity, people’s livelihoods and human rights. The
third section discusses the oil sector, arguing that given the current conditions of
weak societal countervailing forces and weak political institutions, the inflow of
oil revenue will increase inequality and the misappropriation of assets by state
elites.We argue that it is likely the oil windfall will at least minimally benefit rural