Challenges of public-civic partnership in Cambodia’s cultural policy development

Abstract

Partnering with citizens and civil society in public services provision has emerged today as an alternative approach to innovate public service delivery. Engaging different partners (citizens, service users and professionals from all three sectors) allows for more prosperous, fair and inclusive societies. In Cambodia the rationale to take these developments into consideration is different. The central cultural policy issue is not how to modernise and make more efficient public system but how government could take some of the cultural responsibilities regarding culture as public interest which today are undertaken by Cambodian NGOs (with sporadic foreign aid). Namely, Cambodia is a post genocide society that went through 4 years of civil war and 12 years of foreign occupation which resulted in a complete destruction of institutional public structures relevant for the wellbeing of the people (health, education, culture). Many of the tasks have been taken by emerging civil society and not by public administration (lacking specialised knowledge and expertise). In the moment when the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts (MOCFA) of the Kingdom of Cambodia in close cooperation with UNESCO has adopted ambitious national cultural policy document, the question of its implementation becomes the central and the need to find feasible organisational model explicit. The research questions address possibilities of public-civic partnership, collaboration between public authorities and NGOs in Cambodia (as strategy of cultural development), exploring possibilities and obstacles for the establishment of complex cultural organizational context which would balance public responsibility, private entrepreneurialism and civil society visions and needs. How to “unite” Cambodian “agents of change” in an effort to create Cambodia-specific model for democratic policy-making and its implementation? Are the National Arts Forum and the Cultural Task Force, exchange platforms between ministries, public institutions and civil society cultural organizations for the promotion of the contemporary creativity, the answer to this question?