National Mine Action Strategy - Cambodia

Cambodia’s landmine problem is the result of a protracted sequence of internal and regional conflicts that affected the country from the mid 1960s until the end of 1998. The nature of landmine and ERW contamination in Cambodia is highly complex. The northwestern regions bordering Thailand are heavily affected, while other parts of the country (mainly the East) are considered moderate to low impact, affected mainly by ERW. Mines and ERW have caused an unacceptable number of casualties, both military and civilian and have hindered national development. Mine clearance started along the Cambodia-Vietnam border by the company of women soldiers of the Cambodian People’s Revolutionary Army in 1979 with thousands of hectares of land cleared and thousands of mines/ERWs destroyed to provide safe resettlement and agricultural land despite the lack of substantial financial, technical and modern equipment support. The inception of official humanitarian mine clearance in Cambodia dates back to 1992

Guidelines for the establishment of enterprise infirmaries

The Guidelines for the Establishment of Enterprise Infirmaries was launched in December 2017 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia as a tool to guide different stakeholders who work directly with health services at workplaces. The guidelines provide the operational guidance to employers, managers and relevant stakeholders for raising wider awareness in preparing and managing the operations of the enterprise\u27s infirmary. They were the result of a multi-stakeholder policy process led by the Ministry of Labor and Vocational Training with technical and financial support from a working group comprised of development partners, UNFPA, USAID, and other NGOs, Population Council through the Worker Health Coalition Project, Partnering to Save Lives, CARE Cambodia, Reproductive Health Association of Cambodia, Marie Stopes International Cambodia and Enfants et Développement

Global Norms in Domestic Politics: Environmental Norm Contestation in Cambodia’s Hydropower Sector

This paper studies environmental norm contestation in Cambodia's hydropower sector, exemplified by the Kamchay Dam. In Cambodia we can observe different discourses in relation to hydropower. These stem directly from a local contest over the path of Cambodia's development, but use global norms as reference points: one emphasizes environmental protection, using environmental impact assessment (EIA) as point of reference; and one emphasizes the utility of the clean development mechanism (CDM) to attract large-scale investment into the energy sector while downplaying the need for environmental protection. While EIA and CDM are complementary, key actors present them as contradictory. This produces a normative fragmentation of the field of environmental protection. The paper argues that the norm diffusion literature, by presenting norm conflicts as hierarchical local–global conflicts, has paid insufficient attention to the fact that local actors actively draw on global norms to justify domestic development policies. More emphasis on this phenomenon will lead to a better understanding of the role of global norms in domestic politics and will enhance our knowledge of how domestic development policies are contested

South-South technology transfer of low-carbon innovation: large Chinese hydropower dams in Cambodia

Large dams have been controversially debated for decades due to their large‐scale and often irreversible social and environmental impacts. In the pursuit of low‐carbon energy and climate change mitigation, hydropower is experiencing a new renaissance. At the forefront of this renaissance are Chinese actors as the world's largest hydropower dam‐builders. This paper aims to discuss the role of South–South technology transfer of low‐carbon energy innovation and its opportunities and barriers by using a case study of the first large Chinese‐funded and Chinese‐built dam in Cambodia. Using the Kamchay Dam as an example, the paper finds that technology transfer can only be fully successful when host governments and organizations have the capacity to absorb new technologies. The paper also finds that technology transfer in the dam sector needs to go beyond hardware and focus more on the transfer of expertise, skills and knowledge to enable long‐term sustainable development

Increase coverage of HIV and AIDS services in Myanmar

Myanmar is experiencing an HIV epidemic documented since the late 1980s. The National AIDS Programme national surveillance ante-natal clinics had already estimated in 1993 that 1.4% of pregnant women were HIV positive, and UNAIDS estimates that at end 2005 1.3% (range 0.7–2.0%) of the adult population was living with HIV. While a HIV surveillance system has been in place since 1992, the programmatic response to the epidemic has been slower to emerge although short- and medium-terms plans have been formulated since 1990. These early plans focused on the health sector, omitted key population groups at risk of HIV transmission and have not been adequately funded. The public health system more generally is severely under-funded

Ministries of Health and the Stewardship of Health Evidence

This chapter describes how Ministries of Health have been mandated to act as stewards of populations’ health according to the World Health Organization. We argue that this mandate extends to them having (at least partial) responsibility for ensuring relevant evidence informs policy decisions. Yet this requires consideration of the evidence advisory systems serving Ministry needs, particularly whether or how such systems work to provide relevant information in a timely manner to key decision points in the policy process. Insights from our six cases are presented to illustrate the structural and practical differences which exist between evidence advisory systems and how, at certain times, key health decisions may in fact lie outside ministerial authority. These divergent experiences highlight a range of analytical challenges when considering the provision of evidence to inform health decisions from an institutional perspective

Cultural specificity versus institutional universalism: a critique of the National Integrity System (NIS) methodology

This article provides an assessment and critique of the National Integrity System approach and methodology, informed by the experience of conducting an NIS review in Cambodia. It explores four key issues that potentially undermine the relevance and value of NIS reports for developing democracies: the narrowly conceived institutional approach underpinning the NIS methodology; the insufficient appreciation of cultural distinctiveness; a failure properly to conceptualise and articulate the very notion of ‘integrity’; and an over emphasis on compliance-based approaches to combating corruption at the expense of the positive promotion of integrity. The article seeks to offer some pointers to how the NIS approach could be adapted to broaden its conceptualisation of institutions and integrity, and thereby provide reports that are more theoretically informed as well as being more constructive and actionable

China’s Dam Builders: their role in transboundary river management in Southeast Asia

This article investigates China’s role as the world’s largest builder of and investor in large dams, focussing on the Greater Mekong Sub-Region in South-East Asia. It addresses the role Chinese actors play in dam-building as well as the environmental, social, economic and political implications by drawing on case studies from Cambodia and Vietnam. The article finds that China’s dam-building is perceived very differently in different countries of South-East Asia. In Cambodia, the dams in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region are considered instruments of economic growth and development, whereas downstream in Vietnam the dams are seen as potentially undermining national growth, development and security