The National Childcare Agenda in Cambodia: A Feminist Transformative Ethics of Care Perspective

Abstract

This article critically examines Cambodia’s national childcare agenda from a feminist transformative ethics of care perspective. It employs a discourse analysis for policy texts and examines, through in-depth interviews and participant observation, the perspectives and/or lived experiences of people engaged in and/or affected by the policy. The researcher conducted 104 in-depth interviews and observed three meetings/workshops in Cambodia from February to May in 2018. This paper argues that Cambodia’s national childcare agenda is far from ‘transformative’ because it neither contributes to the redistribution of childcare loads from the family to the public sphere nor enhances women’s autonomy in a way that enables them to participate in the labour market. A primary contribution of this paper is its application of a feminist transformative ethics of care to childcare policy analysis in Cambodia, in a developing country context. This transformative tool brings together different feminist thinking to enable us to investigate and evaluate childcare policy discourses, how they are interpreted by different actors, and how they shape policy practices and people’s lives.