‘Education for All’ in Cambodia: Democratic Educational and Children’s Empowerment Global Values Facing State Patronage

Abstract

Among countries in Southeast Asia, Cambodia hosts the most NGOs per inhabitant and is particularly influenced by international education policies. To this extent, Cambodia constitutes a pertinent fieldwork location for reflection upon the role of global governance of education in the ‘global South’. Grounded in long-term fieldwork in a village and primary school, and multi-sited fieldwork with education technocrats and functionaries at the national and provincial levels, this article examines the cooperation between the state and the ‘global-politic’ in the way that it is polarised around the development of the policy ‘Education for All’ (EFA) in Cambodia. I argue that the global actors in education are promoting a kind of ‘moral economy’ of education and that their different programmes, however diverse they may be, are underpinned by common democratic and empowerment values. These values remain fairly ‘silent’, buried beneath technocratic demands, and clash with the informal economy of patronage grafted onto the Ministry of Education. This is an informal economy to which I give some empirical depth. I defend the fact that this moral confrontation is part of the context in which a paradoxical situation has emerged and that some light needs to be shed on this paradox in a country where the post-colonial state of education agrees, to a certain extent, to delegate part of its sovereignty for the benefit of the ‘global-politic’ of education.