Ethnicity and Local Governance

This is an assessment of indigenous peoples (IP) safeguards under the Worldbank-support Rural Investment and Local Governance Project (RILGP) in Cambodia.

RILGP is the main funding mechanisms for local commune councils throughout the Kingdom and provides substantial project management, policy making and implementation support to the state at all of its levels.

The assessment finds that RILGP operates, since project inception, in a state of non-compliance with the letter and spirit of Worldbank policy on indigenous peoples. The gulf between Bank-policy and RILGP-practice has only grown with the recent expansion of project scope to all Cambodian provinces (with the exception of one) and state-reform at all sub-central levels of governance.

RILGP practice not only violates Worldbank policy but also those of UNDP (UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), UNDG Guidelines on Indigenous Peoples’ Issues (2008), which has recently joined RILGP with substantial investment, through the Project to Support Democratic Development through Decentralization and Deconcentration (PSDD). Because those recent UN instruments on indigenous peoples have much stronger provisions in governance-related areas, RILGP-contradictions with those policies are even more profound.

This assessment focuses on Bank-policy, however, because the Bank’s financial engagement in RILGP is the greatest and longest-running, because the Bank has an inspection panel to enhance compliance and because the Bank has a history of non-compliance with its IP policy in Cambodia. Indeed it is hard to come by any evidence of any Bank-supported measure in Cambodia that specifically and positively benefits indigenous peoples. For the most part, Bank-practice follows a strategy of avoidance, staying clear of sectors, geographical and policy areas in which safeguards would likely be triggered. Where this strategy is impractical, safeguards systems have been established that mistakenly assume culturally appropriate benefits rather than taking any positive measures to ensure them, such as in the case of RILGP.

With the given time constraints, this assessment can only just gesture at the major blunders and provide the documents most relevant to this assessment, leaving more thorough analysis to the reader and future posts.

There is considerable literature available to demonstrate that RILGP is in violation of Bank-policy on indigenous peoples. However, this analysis is for the most part based on the Bank’s own safeguards-related documents. While this excludes many of RILGP’s failures from the analysis, it has the advantage of showing that RILGP is in non-compliance even on its own terms of protection and the terms of studies the Bank has commissioned itself. In most cases, the analysis highlights RILGP safeguards obligations based on Bank-policy, presents the relevant findings from a Bank-commissioned study and contrasts those with the “measures” the Bank is taking to address those findings based on RILGP’s safeguards strategy.

Key Documents

Worldbank Operational Directive 4.20 (1991)

The Worldbank issued its first indigenous peoples safeguards policy, Operational Directive 4.20 (OP 4.20), in 1991. The policy has been under revision for many years until a considerably watered-down version was issued a few years ago, OP 4.10. However, RILGP continues to operate on the safeguards systems initially designed on the stronger OP 4.20 policy. This means that the bar for RILGP safeguard obligations is considerably higher than for Bank projects appraised during recent years based on the weaker predecessor policy OP 4.10. This difference could not have mattered in the implementation of RILGP during the past 6 years or so, as the project operates without either a safeguards or a monitoring system for most practical purposes.

Bank-commissioned Indigenous Upland Minorities Screening Study (2002)

In 2002, the Bank commissioned an Indigenous Upland Minorities Screening Study (‘screening study’) on Highland Peoples in Cambodia in preparation of RILGP, as it is obliged to do under Bank-policy, in order to determine whether OP 4.20 applies to Highland Peoples in Cambodia. This study contains not only a lengthy analysis of Highland Peoples in a few provinces but also an assessment of their priority needs at the time, as well as an assessment of potential negative impacts from RILGP-supported activities. This study accurately identifies Cambodia’s Highland Peoples as indigenous peoples and it also raises some of the issues that matter and makes a few genuine contributions. It is a decent piece of scholarly work. Among other things, the study identifies some of the tremendous negative impacts of road building in highland areas on Highland Peoples and it also found that the IP safeguards-policy proposed under RILGP was “unrealistic” in the key areas related to indigenous peoples’ land and natural resources.

However, the study miserably fails to perform its function in the Bank’s safeguards framework. Firstly, it considers in its impact assessment only the local planning and investment component of RILGP but fails to even mention RILGP’s policy support and project management component. Secondly, the study fails to appreciate its own findings in its concluding assessment of RILGP safeguards strategy. It thus ends supporting a strategy that falls dramatically and predictably short of addressing even the issues accurately identified.

RILGP Indigenous Peoples Development Plan (2003)

RILGP’s Indigenous Peoples Development Plan (‘IP Plan’) was developed during project preparation and contains the project’s current, unchanged, safeguards and monitoring strategy to protect Cambodia’s indigenous peoples from negative project impacts. The screening study was undertaken to support the development of RILGP’s IP Plan. Yet the text of this document not only conceals the major finding of the screening study but it misrepresents, manipulates and directly contradicts its findings in various key areas. As all safeguards-related documents, it covers only the rural investment aspects of RILGP-supported activities and is silent on the full range of governance-related support. It only considers impacts from particular infrastructure project but not any impacts from the kind of governance system RILGP has helped establishing to deliver those projects. A monitoring system has been set up that does little more than smiling past the full range of potential and actual negative impacts of RILGP-supported activities. The IP Plan does not address any of the major issues raised in the screening study and as a result is hopelessly inadequate and contradicts almost the full range of Bank-safeguards policy. Yet even the insincere measures invoked in this plan have not in 6 years been implemented in any meaningful sense.

Key Contradictions of Bank-Safeguards

Culturally Inappropriate by Definition

Article 5 of the IP Plan is worth quoting in full, as it explains RILGP’s approach to indigenous peoples safeguarding:

“The plan focuses on one objective: ensuring appropriate opportunities for local participation at both the village and commune levels. With appropriate participation, project activities responding to needs identified by villagers themselves can be considered to be “culturally appropriate” by definition. Similarly, with appropriate participation there is no basis for considering a village to be “adversely affected” as a direct consequence of a development activity the village itself has initiated” (IP Plan: 3).

By equating “culturally appropriate” with “participation“, the plan cancels “culture” out of the needs of indigenous peoples and indeed, out of the safeguards system, by definition. But by the same theory, the plan has failed its one objective, by definition, if the resulting activities fail to respond to the actual needs, which they do, inherently, as the Bank-commissioned screening study demonstrates.

Informed Participation and the Broken Promise of Empowerment

OD 4.20 is built on the principle of “informed participation” of indigenous peoples themselves:

“Thus, identifying local preferences through direct consultation, incorporation of indigenous knowledge into project approaches … are core activities for any project that affects indigenous peoples”.

In contrast, the IP Plan states that

“because RILGP would empower local communities to determine their own development priorities … prior assessment of the appropriateness and impacts of particular projects is impossible” (IP Plan: 2).

Conveniently, RILGP’s IP Plan does away with all requirements for informed participation, based on the unsupported assumption that “RILGP would empower local communities to determine their own development priorities“. Indeed RILGP’s entire safeguard and monitoring system is built on this assumption, which the findings of the Bank’s own screening study have demonstrated to be patently and indeed inherently false.

Indigenous Development Priorities and Negative Impacts

The Screening Study in 2002 included an assessment of the types of projects and activities most urgently needed by indigenous peoples. 42 indigenous discussion groups were asked to list the top 5 indigenous priority needs. Here is the result of the Bank-commissioned assessment (number in brackets indicates number of discussion groups who ranked the particular need among the top 5 priorities):

1. Health related projects (40 out of 42)
2. Education-related projects (30 of 42 groups)
3. Road infrastructure (16 of 42 groups)
4. Wells (”very common request”)
5. Water storage and irrigation (”common request”)
6. Agricultural extension projects (”common”)
7. Livestock projects (”very common”) (Screening Study: pp.136).

Significant negative socioeconomic impacts were identified only for one type of project, road infrastructure, a need prioritized by only a minority of groups, as follows:

“The discussion groups did identify potential negative impacts associated with road projects. These potential negative impacts can be listed as follows:

• • That some bad and clever outsiders may come after the road is built and exploit the assets of the village.
  • That outsiders may come and take their land.
  • That the road may lead to their forests being destroyed or degraded by (sometimes armed) outsiders and it will then be difficult to find forest food and forest products to sell.

Possible land appropriation and deforestation following road construction is a major potential negative socioeconomic impact. There are cases where such negative impacts, particularly in terms of deforestation, have occurred following road construction in forest dependent communities … . Many forest areas have already been degraded in areas with poor road infrastructure. However, improved roads can accelerate that process and open new areas for exploitation by a larger number of logging interests” (Screening Study: 136).

It is apparent that those negative impacts have the potential for great damage to indigenous societies, individually and communally, and to profoundly compromise achievement of RILGP, OD 4.20 or about any other Bank-objectives among Cambodia’s indigenous peoples.

It is worth quoting in full the screening study’s recommendations on how RILGP should address those impacts:

“The most severe negative socioeconomic impact would be an increase in illegal logging, deforestation and poaching activities in forest areas utilized by upland minority peoples, which may accompany rural road infrastructure improvements in forested upland areas.

The discussion groups did have suggestions on how to mitigate such negative impacts. The suggestions for addressing these potential problems can be listed as follows.

• • The government must provide legal recognition of upland minority peoples’ land and forest rights.
  • The government must strictly enforce the ban on illegal logging.
  • The government should introduce new and better regulations to address these problems and to protect the interests of upland minority villagers.
  • There is no way to solve this problem as complaints are not addressed and the powerful people are not interested. The forests around the village have already been destroyed.
  • The villagers will struggle in some way to defend these resources.

The possibilities for developing strategies to mitigate these negative impacts within the commune development planning process and through RILGP support is limited. Commune councils and indigenous communities do not have a formal role in forest policing or law enforcement …. One conceivable strategy would be to make funding for road infrastructure improvements in upland minorities areas contingent upon their prior possession of some form of recognized rights ….

An alternative strategy is to consider means of enhancing the monitoring of illegal logging within these communities. Upland minority communities and commune councils are aware of illegal logging activities in their forests. The problem is that reports from these communities to higher responsible authorities do not always result in law enforcement, particularly where loggers may be operating with armed police or military units” (Screening Study: 136).

Not one of those suggestions from Bank-commissioned experts or indigenous peoples themselves has been incorporated in RILGP’s IP Plan and active “safeguards” system.

Denying Negative Impacts on Indigenous Peoples Instead of Mitigating Them

Instead, the IP Plan simply denies that there is any problem at all. In direct contradiction of the devastating impacts of roads identified by Bank-commissioned experts, and instead of doing anything at all to avoid or mitigate it, the IP Plan states that

“the small-scale activities chosen by villagers and funded through RILGP will not affect land tenure or otherwise cause any direct adverse impacts” (IP Plan: 4).

Wait a minute, did not the same IP Plan just state that “prior assessment of the appropriateness and impacts … is impossible” because “RILGP would empower local communities to determine their own development priorities”? So how is it a few paragraphs later possible to know that activities chosen by empowered communities will not have direct adverse impacts? Which one is it?

But much more importantly, how is that claim not irreconcilably in contradiction with the Bank-commissioned expert assessment that “possible land appropriation and deforestation following road construction is a major potential negative socioeconomic impact“? Outsiders operating with armed police and military units illegally taking indigenous lands and destroying their forests will not affect land tenure and cause direct adverse impacts? The Bank commissions experts to find that there is a big problem and instead of dealing with it, the Bank decides that the problem does not exist.

There is more to be said about roads. Here are the reasons respondents mentioned for wanting roads:

• • Easier and faster to take seriously ill people to hospital.
  • Savings in travel time.
  • Increased access to markets to trade products and buy commodities.
  • Increased income from sale of products.
  • Easier for children to go to school.
  • Easier for the elderly to go to ceremonies (Screening Study: 136).

In other words, major reasons for wanting roads were to address indigenous priority needs 1 and 2, to access health and education services, the only 2 needs that had been prioritized by strong majorities of indigenous discussion groups. These urgent needs of indigenous peoples could be addressed in large part directly, without a road. Furthermore, if there are no education or health services along or at the end of the road, and if people have no money to get there and pay for them, then those urgent priority needs continue to go unaddressed even if a road is build.

As for selling products and buying commodities, most indigenous people are subsistence farmers who don’t have much to sell in the market, as the screening study points out. As the screening study also points out, the potential impact of roads is the loss of land and the destruction of forests. With lands and forests gone, not only is there nothing left to sell but there may be no place left to stay and nothing left to eat. The Bank’s own assessment suggests that indigenous peoples may loose everything for gaining nothing from the construction of roads, unless indigenous lands and natural resources are effectively protected.

As the screening study generalizes from its findings:

“Many people in these communities do not possess private transport and walking is the primary means of travel”.

Where “walking is the primary means of travel“, the greatest savings in travel time would surely be had with roads that are in or near the village. Few ceremonies elders may want to attend will not be in the village or a neighboring one. Where many have no bicycles, roads need not be wide. Roads and bridges that can support bicycles and motorbikes could be build inexpensively and with villager’s participation.

Observation suggests that roads built by commune councils accommodate luxury SUVs and even logging trucks. To build those roads, councils contract companies who construct roads with heavy machinery. It is very expensive and expenses rise over proportionally with remoteness, because there are no ways to bring in heavy machines in the first place. The kind of roads financed by RILGP in the highlands are not required to address the expressed needs of Highland Peoples. They typically connect commune centers with urban areas instead of villages with each other or the commune center. Roads come at high opportunity costs of more urgent needs not being met. Instead, this kind of roads addresses the needs of bad, clever and sometimes armed outsiders to exploit villagers’ assets, take their lands and destroy their forests.

Observations suggest that people in those remote villages may indeed prioritize “road” in village level meetings and what they most plausibly mean is a simple road along the path they walk daily. This village level priority is then taken to the commune council, where its members and facilitators from higher levels “average” the need for local roads and integrate them into a plan to build a road from the commune center to the next urban center. Commune councilors tend to live near the commune center, not in remote villages and district facilitators are likely to live at the district center. Both are likely among the few to own a car and to expect rewards and indeed “development” from above rather than below.

Making Indigenous Production Systems Unsustainable

OD 4.20 states that

“development activities should support production systems that are well adapted to the needs and environment of indigenous peoples, and should help production systems under stress to attain sustainable levels”.

The screening study cautions that the expression of assistance for lowland rice farming may be uninformed and inadequate:

“Lowland rice has been increasingly adopted by some as a means to address rice shortages. While this coping strategy is providing some benefits, it is all too often beset with production problems and risks”.

“There appears to be a striking lack of awareness of the potential for innovation in swidden upland, permanent multi-cropping and agro-forestry production systems based on the experience and technologies developed in other upland areas, particularly those in neighboring Thailand and Vietnam”.

“From these points it seems that much more remains to be done to increase the awareness of upland minority peoples in terms of the range of agricultural assistance projects that could be made available and demanded” (Screening Study: 138).

RILGP-Modalities: Maximizing Negative Impacts and Minimizing Appropriate Benefits

In contrast to the RILGP-commissioned assessment of indigenous priority needs and their respective negative impacts and cultural appropriateness, consider the following description of RILGP-modalities mentioned in the screening study:

“The modality for the proposed World Bank loan is as follows: Out of its national budget, the Royal Government of Cambodia will provide Commune/Sangkat Fund (C/SF) money to selected communes. The World Bank loan will then be used to reimburse the government for eligible projects that have been implemented by the communes. Projects most likely to be eligible are investments in small-scale infrastructure (building or repairing roads, schools, irrigation infrastructure, bridges, wells etc.)” (Screening Study: 130).

With these modalities, it would be irrational for the government to let commune councils prioritize projects that are not eligible for Bank-reimbursement. Projects that appropriately address indigenous priorities without major negative impacts are unlikely to be eligible for World Bank reimbursement. Thus RILGP-support is likely to address indigenous priorities with projects that are fraught with negative impacts and cultural inappropriateness, if at all, by design. Commune councils will not be able to use their own budget to address the top one and top two indigenous priorities and neither can they respond to top 6 and 7 priorities. Few things limit commune councils’ ability to respond to indigenous peoples needs more than RILGP-modalities.

These recently issued ToR for regional safeguards advisors confirm the concern about what kind of projects are actually supported with RILGP-funding, unfortunately only in nation-wide aggregation and rough breakdown:

“At present, almost all development funds from the C/S Fund are being used for small scale public infrastructure investments of which about 75% are for rural road construction and rehabilitation, 15% for irrigation and canals, and about 5% for small water projects and schools”.

Firstly, most priority needs expressed by indigenous groups were services, notably health and education on top of the list. No services are supported under RILGP, only infrastructure. ¾ of RILGP supported local projects are concentrated on projects with the greatest negative impact on indigenous societies. Another 15% are used on irrigation and canals that supports lowland Khmer modes and systems of agricultural production, and have no relevance to indigenous highland cultivation.

In fact OD 4.20 mentions “agriculture” and “road construction” on top of a list of sectors that require particular careful screening of potential negative impacts on indigenous peoples. By its own description, RILGP is for 75% a national road building project and an agricultural project for most of the rest. Safeguards-related documents conveniently disguise that fact by claiming that RILGP is another kind of project, highlighting the supposed “small scale” of the projects supported under RILGP and the supposed impossibility of knowing in advance what kind of projects will be supported. Given RILGP-modalities, it is quite cynical to suggest in the IP Plan that “prior assessment of the appropriateness and impacts of particular activities to be funded under the project is impossible” of all things because “RILGP would empower local communities to determine their own development priorities“.

“Legal rights not being respected, laws not being enforced”

OD 4.20 states that the IP Plan

“should contain an assessment of the ability of such groups to obtain access to and effectively use the legal system to defend their rights. Particular attention should be given to the rights of indigenous peoples to use and develop the lands that they occupy, to be protected against illegal intruders, and to have access to natural resources vital to their subsistence and reproduction”.

By the Bank’s own screening study, RILGP itself threatens the rights of indigenous peoples to use and develop their lands and vital natural resources, not least by financing roads that enable indigenous land alienation and destruction of their forests.

Related to indigenous peoples ability to defend their rights in the legal system, the screening study notes

“Legal rights not being respected, laws not being enforced … are examples of the general climate that commune councils and community members must live and operate in. Until these challenges are overcome, many threats remain and indigenous people will have severe difficulties in being agents of their own change” (Screening Study: 140).

In direct response to the draft IP Plan, the authors of the screening study state that

“One strategy that may be difficult for commune councils to implement is the one requiring them to assess if land rights and mapping is sufficiently clear to protect highland peoples from in-migration or loss of resources. The commune does not exist in isolation from other, more powerful interests and as long as land and forest ownership and user rights remain unclear and existing laws are not enforced, it might be unrealistic to expect council members to be responsible for this” (Screening Study: 142).

This is a profound concern indeed and more so than it may appear at first. But even though Bank-commissioned experts suggest that this strategy is “unrealistic“, the only revision of the IP Plan appears to be to shift this responsibility from the commune council to the Commune Planning and Budgeting Committee, which it charges with assessing potential induced effects,

“specifically whether mapping and land rights are sufficiently clear to protect Highland Peoples from in-migration or loss of access to resources” (IP Plan: 8).

If anything, this revision makes the strategy less, not more, realistic. Members of this committee are all appointed by the council or its chief but don’t have any of their legal powers. Their only role is to participate in local needs prioritization. This statement profoundly misrepresents the problems identified by the screening study, by implying that protection from land alienation, in-migration or loss of access to resources is a matter of mapping and rights being sufficiently clear. The screening study makes reasonably clear that it is a matter of “legal rights not being respected, laws not being enforced”.

RILGP’s entire promise of empowerment, participation and culturally appropriate benefits for indigenous peoples hinges on the assumption that commune councils are in a position to respond to indigenous peoples’ needs and empower indigenous communities. If there are “more powerful interests” that take indigenous peoples’ land and resources with impunity, village-level participation in choosing the road is not going to help it.

The larger problem here is not that commune councils built roads but that the Bank provides the money for doing so directly to the government whose military and police units work with powerful criminals who take indigenous peoples’ land and destroy their forests wholesale, with impunity.

The threat of loosing lands and livelihoods is incomparably greater than RILGP benefits could ever be, partly due to the specific vulnerabilities that OD 4.20 accurately identifies. As the authors note elsewhere, “commune councils have no formal jurisdiction over forests” (Screening Study: xiii). Neither do they have formal jurisdiction over land. It is hard to see how the authors of a screening study for a project supposedly aimed at local empowerment and with “local governance” in its name could have failed to more on the nature of those “more powerful interests“, on why “legal rights are not being respected” and what the implications are of “laws are not being enforced” into their assessment. But even more stunning is that RILGP continues to operate on an IP Plan that does not even acknowledge this fundamental problem.

What the screening study does not mention is that virtually all commune councils in highland areas, like in most rural areas, are dominated by the ruling party, with many councils not having a single member from any other party. Since constituents vote for party lists rather than candidates, Election Day is a day on which decisions with little significance for local governance are made. In such context, democracy cannot be counted on to contribute to accountability in local governance.

In an environment characterized by the abuse of laws and legal rights by “more powerful interests” with impunity, members of the commune council have little incentive to respond to constituents’ needs. The authority and powers of their state offices along with their insider knowledge makes councilors, particularly commune chiefs, extremely valuable partners for those “more powerful interests” in taking indigenous peoples’ land and resources. In a lawless context of this kind, it is economically highly rational for commune council members, regardless of their ethnicity, to facilitate powerful outsiders in taking the lands and natural resources of indigenous peoples or to make profits from land speculation, not least from land price increases induced by new roads. This course of action offers monetary rewards incomparably greater than re-election or even a lifetime of councilor salaries. With perverse incentives of this kind, it has become unrealistic to expect council members not to join the race to the bottom of indigenous impoverishment, to enrich themselves on the expense of the indigenous constituency before someone else does, before its all gone or before the much less likely event that relevant indigenous rights and interests become more effectively protected.

The Significance of Draft Rights in a Predatory State

The IP Plan mentions that in 1997, an Inter-ministerial Committee for Highland Peoples Development (IMC) prepared a draft “General Policy for Highland Peoples Development” and accurately notes that it “has never been formally adopted by the government” (IP Plan: 4). The IP Plan goes on to quote the following 3 provisions from this Highlander Policy:

• The government “shall promote understanding and respect of cultural diversity and ensure that Highland Peoples can practice their own cultures”
• “Highland Peoples shall have the right to be fully informed about, determine the priorities for and to exercise control over their economic, social and cultural development”
• “Highland Peoples’ communities shall be given the opportunity to participate and take responsibility in all decisions regarding infrastructure projects that affect them. The affected community and persons must have agreed, after being fully informed in a language that they clearly understand, of the project and all its consequences for them and their natural environment, before any development project may proceed” (IP Plan: 5).

The IP Plan then states that

“for the purposes of RILGP, the Kingdom of Cambodia has agreed to employ measures consistent with the above policy provisions to guide project design and implementation arrangements” (IP Plan: 5).

These policy provisions are actually considerably stronger than those in OD 4.20. Specifically, the concept of free, prior and informed consent embodied in the last provision goes much further than the OD 4.20’s principle of “informed participation” (or the principle of “informed consultation” underlying the successor policy OD 4.10). Among other things it implies indigenous peoples’ rights to say “no” to any proposed project and that in all other cases they must have agreed to it before it may proceed.

It is not however clear what the difference is between the Kingdom of Cambodia adopting and implementing policy provisions on one hand and employing “measures consistent with” them on the other. The single most consistent measure the government could take is the adoption and implementation of that policy. What the Bank has done is a lot like agreeing with someone suggesting ‘Ok, you give me all that money and I agree to take measures consistent with passing an anti-corruption law‘. At the time the IP Plan was developed, the highlander policy had been what the IP Plan calls “under consideration” for 6 years already. The government has not employed this measure in the following 5 years either.

A minimal definition of taking measures consistent with provisions of the draft policy would be to not take measures that are inconsistent with them. The government however does not appear to have taken even a single measure positively consistent with this policy and it is clear to any casual newspaper reader that it has taken any number of measures that fundamentally contradict it. RILGP is not the least among the latter.

So what does it mean for the Kingdom of Cambodia to have agreed to employ such measures? Has indeed someone in a position to commit the Cambodian state has entered an agreement with someone in a position to commit the World Bank, a multilateral institution, to respect indigenous peoples rights? What is the legal status of this agreement? Is it an international treaty of some sort or just a gentleman agreement? If indigenous peoples have the right to informed participation, should someone have mentioned it to them? More importantly, should someone at the Bank have followed up on what measures the government is actually taking? Do or do not Highland Peoples have rights? How much less of these rights is the difference between the policy and measures consistent with it?

Even on the most minimal interpretation of those provisions, it appears that RILGP itself is a measure that is inconsistent with Highland’s Peoples rights under those provisions, to practice their own culture, to exercise control over their own development and to free, prior and informed consent in decisions regarding infrastructure. The standard of protection incorporated with these provisions into the IP Plan is in any interpretation much stronger than OP 4.20 or the pathetic non-measures in the IP Plan itself. Indeed the government would have demonstrated the validity of its agreement by rejecting RILGP’s terms of protection of indigenous peoples rights.

Engineering Indigenous Consent

What is maybe the most manipulative claim in the IP Plan is that consultations of indigenous peoples “on their preferences regarding project design and implementation arrangements” had been carried out and “indicated broad popular support for participating in the project, and broad agreement that proposed implementation arrangements were satisfactory” (IP Plan: 4).

Firstly, a screening study of the kind conducted by RILGP is by no means an appropriate tool to establish the kind of “broad” support and consent the IP Plan claims RILGP received. The primary objective was to determine whether OD 4.20 applies to Highland Peoples in 3 target provinces. Indeed it defies common sense that broad agreement on project design and implementation arrangements of a project of RILGP-like proportion and complexity could be established in 2 hour group discussions, even if the group were made up of Bank-staff. It is no more plausible to expect such agreement from ad hoc groups of mostly illiterate indigenous respondents in discussions that inevitably involved interpretation in three languages.

More importantly, the screening study did not actually inform or consult indigenous peoples on their preferences regarding project design and implementation arrangements and it also did not ask people if they wanted to participate or if they thought the proposed arrangements were satisfactory.

There is only one set of questions in the screening study that can conceivably have been abused to indicate indigenous peoples’ consent to RILGP and it is worth quoting the paragraph in full:

“The third topic of discussions about governance concerned upland minority peoples’ opinions about how to improve the participation of upland minorities in local governance. These ideas are those expressed in the proposed Royal Government of Cambodia/World Bank draft Highland Peoples Development Plan (see annex 4). Villagers participating in the discussion groups were introduced to these questions by explaining to them that these ideas were those of the government and the World Bank about how to help upland minority peoples participate in local government planning. It was then explained that the government and the World Bank wanted to ask them for their opinions about how important each of these ideas were to helping them participate in local governance” (Screening Study: 109).

In other words, no indigenous persons were asked about their ideas on how to improve their own participation. No options or alternatives were presented or considered. Instead, a few respondents were confronted with the result to which their ‘informed participation’ was supposed to lead. Those measures were presented as the ideas “of the government and the World Bank“. Few villagers in Cambodia but even less indigenous persons here dare publicly rejecting ideas of the government even if they are really bad ones.

Here is the full set of questions asked:

• For you to participate in development planning in meetings with the commune council, how important is it that these discussions occur in your own upland minority language?
• How important is it that you are given information about the possible benefits of each project that you want in the village?
• How important is it that you are given information about possible negative effects of each project that you want in the village?
• If there are possible negative effects of a project that you want, how important is it that you or your representatives participate in planning how to avoid or reduce these problems with the project?
• How important is it that pre-project assessments of benefits and possible negative effects are completed, and the results are shared with village representatives and villagers before the project commences?
• How important is it that upland minority representatives are appointed to the commune advisory board? (Screening Study: 110-111).

In other words, respondents were asked if they wanted to live in a beautiful garden of good governance. Adding “each project that you want” to almost all questions makes it sound like there will be many projects of the kind people want with lots of benefits, based on prior consent, full participation in their own language, avoidance or reduction of negative impacts. There is no indication that someone bothered mentioning RILGP-modalities, namely that the choice for “each project that you want” would in most cases be limited to choosing the road. Even more importantly, asking questions in this way implies that there will not be projects that people don’t want.

Unsurprisingly, the study finds that “the six measures from the draft development plan were well received and were regarded as very important among these upland minority discussion groups” (Screening Study: 109). Apparently it is from the warm reception this fairy tale of good governance received among a few intimidated indigenous respondents that RILGP-management has concluded “broad popular support for participating in the project, and broad agreement that proposed implementation arrangements were satisfactory.” The gap between this fantasy and RILGP-supported reality of local governance is as wide as earth and sky.

Institutionalizing Misrepresentation of Indigenous Peoples

The one section that maybe most profoundly contradicts the claim of “broad” support for and agreement with RILGP is entitled “Selecting village leaders and representatives“. It is worth quoting the first paragraphs from Ratanakiri:

“The quantitative team found that both gender groups - in all cases - also recognized that the commune chief now had the right to appoint village leaders. However, on this point villagers often strongly disagreed. In one third of the discussion groups, including both women’s and men’s groups, villagers expressly wished to have it pointed out that they disagree with this and that they want to vote for their village leader. These groups raised this issue specifically at their own initiative under a final open area of discussion where villagers could add any other important ideas concerning local governance that they desired to communicate to the research team. They were not originally asked if they agreed with this aspect of the law …” (Screening Study: 106).

“As with the quantitative results regarding village leaders, virtually everyone - both men and women - had clear opinions about this: the villagers themselves should select the representatives” (Screening Study: 106).

As RILGP’s own screening study makes painfully clear, indigenous societal organization is village based and so are pattern of participation in them, inevitably. For this reason, the “selection of village leaders and representatives” is of utmost importance to RILGP objectives. However, RILGP failed to ask indigenous people if they would like to have their leaders and representatives appointed from a higher level (as a matter of decentralization). Although indigenous men and women “were not originally asked if they agreed with this aspect“, many were brave enough to have “raised this issue specifically at their own initiative” and they “strongly disagreed“. In response to not being consulted about their preferences of a key issue, they “expressly wished to have it pointed out that they disagree with this and that they want to vote for their village leader“. This is the sound of indigenous peoples’ broad agreement and support for RILGP project design and implementation arrangements.

Here is the relevant section from interviews in Kratie:

“Most villagers wanted the village representatives to be chosen by the villagers, although a few said that it was up to the commune council - one person thought so because he thought the commune council wouldn’t respect their choice anyway” (Screening Study: 116).

This is a selection from the Preah Vihear section:

“In response to the question of the commune leader’s right to appoint village leaders, two of the four men’s groups interviewed by the quantitative team replied that this was “not correct” because they believed the villagers themselves should choose the village leader” (Screening Study: 123).

Mainstreaming Indigenous Peoples Instead of Indigenous Rights

OD 4.20 states that “the Bank’s broad objective towards indigenous people … is to ensure that the development process fosters full respect for their dignity, human rights, and cultural uniqueness” and it partly identifies IP as well as the distinct vulnerability of these groups by them using a distinct language. So does RILGP’s IP Plan.

However, none of the laws whose implementation RILGP supports has any provisions for the use of indigenous languages in local and sub-central governance. Instead, those laws require prospective local representatives to be literate in Khmer, the language of the ethnic majority. The two laws that govern the election and administration of local Commune Councils make no mentioning of indigenous peoples and the recent organic law regulating administration and management of sub-central governance contains only 1 or 2 operationally irrelevant references to these groups. In this regard, the IP Plan notes:

“Members of Highland Peoples groups are not explicitly ineligible for Commune Council service, but a requirement that council members must be able to read and write in Khmer may discourage direct participation. To ensure adequate representation from each village within the commune, a Planning and Budgeting Committee will be established to advise the Commune Council” (IP Plan: 6).

What is not explicit about a legal “requirement that council members must be able to read and write in Khmer“? Khmer is the native language of one ethnic group but not of any of the indigenous peoples in Cambodia, the majority of whose members does not speak and understand Khmer language near any threshold for meaningful participation in local governance. None of those Cambodian languages has had a written script until a few years ago and the majority of them to this day. Being legally ineligible for standing in local elections to represent and serve ones community on the grounds that one does not speak another people’s language, that would be pretty upsetting for members of any community and so is having ones choice for community leaders limited to members capable of functioning in the institutions of another culture.

A legal requirement to write and read in a language foreign to most indigenous persons may indeed “discourage direct participation” in local governance. There is no reason to think that it discourages indirect participation any less. There is every reason to think that institutions of local governance operating exclusively in the language of another ethnic group alienate, marginalize and exclude indigenous peoples. They also put unique indigenous languages out of public use. This is a big problem. It is a big problem because participation not just in electing the party and prioritizing the road but in “local decision-making” was the whole point of Seila, RILGP and the IP Plan in the first place and because indigenous communities were pretty good at it until all the plans and projects to enhance their participation in their own affairs came along.

The IP Plan conveniently ignores the problem that the new system of local governance is linguistically incompatible with indigenous participation. Instead, it limits its elaboration to the much smaller problem that indigenous villages may end up being numerically underrepresented on commune councils.

To this much smaller problem, RILGP responds with precisely the kind of measure that indigenous peoples had most vehemently opposed during the screening study: the installation of commune-council appointees as their communities’ representatives:

“This committee will include two representatives from each village who formally are to be appointed by the Commune Council … In addition to appointment of two representatives from each village, the commune chief may select as many as four other village representatives to serve as members for service on the advisory committee” (IP Plan: 7).

“In general, available information indicates that most rural villages in northern and northeastern Cambodia are either more or less ethnically homogeneous, or consist predominantly of members of Highland Peoples groups. For heterogeneous villages that include a significant proportion (e.g. more than a third) of Highland Peoples, the Commune Council will ensure they are represented on the advisory committee, either as … appointed village representatives or as members selected by the commune chief” (IP Plan: 7).

It really is secondary whether an indigenous person whose language makes her ineligible to represent and serve her community lives in a heterogeneous or homogenous village, or whether she happens to belong to a “significant proportion” of indigenous peoples in the community or to what RILGP apparently considers to be an insignificant proportion of it (e.g. less than a third). Indeed given RILGP project design and implementation arrangements, it would be more plausible to ask about the difference between homogenous and heterogeneous commune constituencies. No matter at which level one chooses to look at it, the fact that Cambodia is not ethnically or linguistically homogeneous remains and so do the resulting challenges that RILGP chooses to ignore. The fundamental problem that the new system of local governance is linguistically incompatible with indigenous participation, it does not go away even if an indigenous person moves from a heterogonous to a homogenous village or from a village in which her ethnicity is considered insignificant by RILGP to one in which it supposedly is not.

Of all things, not only installing additional commune council appointees as ‘representatives’ of indigenous communities against their express will but putting the same institution they did not wish to choose their representatives in charge of ensuring their representation on a secondary commune-level body is not going to make things better. The underlying logic of this measure is that as long as any one no matter which of “them” sits on some advisory board it will be good enough to demonstrate adequate indigenous representation in the RILGP-scheme, even though the law disqualifies most indigenous people to represent themselves or be properly represented in local governance and as a result, they may not be “directly” participating in it. RILGP helps the government create, consolidate and sustain a profoundly undemocratic and diversity un-friendly state.

The Benefits of Standardized Participation

OD 4.20 states that “mechanisms should be devised and maintained for participation by indigenous peoples in decision making throughout project planning, implementation, and evaluation”. In contrast, the IP Plan pretends that RILGP is nothing but a mechanism for participation and thus there is no need to be concerned about genuine participation of indigenous peoples specifically. Instead, the IP Plan reads:

“In general, participation arrangements are standardized throughout the Seila program, and thereby benefit the Khmer majority and other minority groups as well” (IP Plan: 4).

It is an adventurous assertion that of all things, the fact of standardization ensures benefits for indigenous peoples. It would be more plausible to think that the fact of linguistic and institutional standardization, Khmerization and centralization of participation that is, ensures the marginalization and alienation of those whose languages and institutions are excluded from the standard and that such standards of participation are not consistent with full respect for the dignity and cultural uniqueness of indigenous peoples expressed in OD 4.20 and with just about any other provision in it.

Direct Benefits for Indigenous Peoples “Inappropriate”

OD 4.20 states that “A full range of positive actions by the borrower must ensure that indigenous people benefit from development investment”.

In contrast, the IP Plan states that

“Because RILGP promotes integrated commune development planning, it is inappropriate to establish ethnically-based preferences or strictly proportionate criteria for investment” (IP Plan: 7).

Instead of any one substantial positive, targeted measure to ensure benefits for indigenous peoples, of whom OD 4.20 requires the full range, the IP Plan explains in effect that RILGP is a project that promotes ethnically exclusive development and homogenization at the local level and therefore, it would be inappropriate to take measures that benefit indigenous peoples directly. There is nothing inherent in commune development planning that makes positive measures inappropriate. To the contrary, it is hard to think of any other area of public policy making and application in which it would be more appropriate. Nothing in the fact of “integrated” planning would make positive measure inappropriate either unless, of course, RILGP promotes integration of indigenous peoples into a Khmer state, which it does. The statement hides the truth that RILGP itself is one big ethnically-based preference for the Khmer majority, most apparent in the fact that it helps building and consolidating a state that operates at all levels and in all places in the native language of ethnic Khmers only. Because RILGP invests one hundred percent of its considerable support to Cambodia into institutionalizing and modernizing Khmer culture and in applying it throughout the Kingdom’s territory on the expense of all others is it inappropriate to consider proportionate criteria to support minority cultures as well. The IP Plan indeed mirrors accurately the nationalizing nature of modern states that make minorities vulnerable and policies like OD 4.20 necessary in the first place.

Reducing Indigenous Peoples Instead of Negative Impacts

OD 4.20 says that “indigenous peoples” is the term chosen to refer to

“social groups with a social and cultural identity distinct from the dominant society that makes them vulnerable to being disadvantaged in the development process … “

The screening study notes in its literature review that

“In using the name ‘indigenous people’, we are referring to the so-called ‘hill tribes’, rather than the Cham, or Khmer-Islam, who are also considered indigenous to Cambodia. Neither are we concerned here with Lao or Vietnamese inhabitants of the region, though some of these communities have lived in the region for centuries” (Screening Study, Literature Review: 4)

The specialized experts clearly suggest that Cambodia’s Cham (an ethnic group with members numbering at least twice the total of all Highland Peoples combined) are indigenous peoples, too. As far as Bank-safeguards are concerned, the question is not whether Cham ‘are’ indigenous peoples but whether they are vulnerable in the sense of OD 4.20. Surely Cham are a “social groups with a social and cultural identity distinct from the dominant society“. Without doubt do Cham identify and are identified by others as a distinct cultural group and they also have a distinct language and maintain customary social and political institutions.

Contradicting Bank-commissioned experts, the IP Plan states that

“Muslim Chams … are not considered to be “indigenous peoples” in the Cambodian context, and do not generally exhibit characteristics of potential vulnerability as listed in OD 4.20″ (IP Plan: 3).

The experts said that “Cham … are … considered indigenous to Cambodia“. Which one is it? By whom are Cham not considered “indigenous peoples”? By whose definition? Who was consulted? On what analytical grounds was the decision taken to exclude an estimated 6% of the population from the protection and benefits of OD 4.20? No-where does the screening study says that Cham do not exhibit OD 4.20-type characteristics and vulnerabilities. Unless RILGP has commissioned another screening study on Cambodia’s Cham there was no way of knowing that this is a true statement. Bank-commissioned expert advice suggests that it is not.

The IP Plan acknowledges that

“the Cambodian government does not maintain official statistics regarding its ethnic minorities, and available estimates of ethnic demographics and geographic distribution are scarce and contradictory” (IP Plan: 3).

However, despite available estimates being “contradictory“, the IP Plan states only one estimate which happens to be below the very bottom of those available, without mentioning even the source of it:

Though their numbers are relatively small in proportion to the national population, the Highland Peoples are estimated to represent a majority of the population in Ratanakiri and Mondolkiri provinces, both in the northeast. They represent much smaller proportions in other provinces. These groups, among them the Tampuan, Kui, Jarai, Phnong, Kreung, Kavaet, Brou, Stieng, Lun and others, are estimated to total about 120.000 people, or about one percent of the national population…” (IP Plan: 4).

This estimate is not from the Bank-commissioned experts. It is below the 1998 census data based on “mother tongue” which the screening study thoroughly discredits. For only the province of Ratanakiri, the screening study presents 68,457 as a plausible estimate of indigenous persons. The screening study team found a whole new indigenous people in Kampong Speu Province (Sui) and another one in Kratie Province (Chorng). Regarding the later, unfortunately “the team was not able to visit this group so their status as a distinct upland minority group remains uncertain” (Screening Study: 7). Neither group was recorded by the “mother tongue” census or subsequent provincial surveys.

Also in Kratie province, the 1998 “mother tongue” estimate of Highland Peoples is 9,838 individuals, less than half the number of a provincial census one year later (22,931 individuals) judged more credible by the screening study (Screening Study: 7). The number of ‘mother tongue’ Kuy in the 1998 census is 546, while the provincial census gives an almost tenfold figure of 5,216 (Screening Study: 6)

Only for Preah Vihear Province did Bank-experts generate their own estimate. That estimate (21,170 persons) is more than three times greater than the “mother tongue” data, with the estimated Poar population more than ten times as large as the 1998 figures (Screening Study: 9).

About Pursat province, the study notes that it “was not stipulated as a province to be researched specifically under this study, although it is a province that is receiving Seila support” (Screening Study: 16). In other words, Pursat should have been among the provinces stipulated. Without having even visited the province, the screening study team considers there are “201 upland minority households” in Ou Saom commune, Veal Veang district alone and presents information on two villages in another district with a combined number of households of 695 but Pursat province is conveniently not mentioned in the IP Plan.

One can only wonder how many more indigenous peoples, individuals and provinces the screening study team would have turned up had they not been limited to “rapid consultations” among Highland Peoples in four provinces. One also wonders whether the Bank accounts for the money it lends and grants with the same accuracy as for the indigenous peoples it protects. It seems the Bank does not even care to know the names of the groups whose uniqueness it claims to be respecting.

Expanding the Scope of Unmade Agreements and Broken Promises

For a more recent statement on RILGP-safeguarding, consider this Safeguards Datasheet issued in April 2007. In the summary on safeguard issues and impacts, it states that:

“The potential impacts will be manageable through site selection criteria and simple construction management techniques” (p. 3)

The summary of “potential indirect and/or long term impacts” states simply “None” (p.3). This is by no means a valid summary of the Bank’s own screening study and its assessment of potential negative impacts. Rather, it is a direct contradiction of key findings of the screening study the Bank commissioned. It should be obvious to anyone that powerful criminals working with the government’s police and military units to take advantage of indigenous peoples’ land and forests will hardly be managed with site selection criteria and simple construction management techniques.

The appraisal also states that “safeguard frameworks were agreed during preparation of the original RILGP Credit” and thus “would equally apply to the RILGP Additional Financing Grant” (p.4).

In other words, the “broad popular support” RILGP has received from a few intimidated respondents in 4 provinces more than 5 years ago “would equally apply” to the 23 provinces in which RILGP is in operation today.

The Bank has by its own IP Plan no way of knowing anything at all about Highland Peoples in the 20 provinces that were not studied. Most importantly, an unknown majority of indigenous persons and indeed of indigenous peoples in a great majority of Cambodian provinces have never been consulted. None of their members had an opportunity to participate. Many of the few respondents in the consensus-making exercise the Bank calls ‘consultation’ will have died since and there are great numbers of children 5 years and under who were not born when RILGP obtained their “broad popular support“. Mondulkiri Province, for example, has by the IP Plan’s admission a majority of Highland Peoples. Indeed it is the only province in which one indigenous people, Bunong, forms a provincial majority. Yet no Bunong person or representative was consulted when the IP Plan was prepared, or ever since.

In the same section, the safeguards sheet claims that

“During implementation of the RILGP Credit, the compliance with environmental and social safeguards provisions has been satisfactory” (p.4).

How does the Bank know that? Whose assessment is this and on what analytical grounds was it made? Who was consulted? With devastating negative impacts predicted by Bank-commissioned experts and with a safeguards strategy they considered “unrealistic”, the Bank would surely have good reason to take a closer look long time ago.

The safeguard sheet claims that “mechanisms for consultation … have been in place since preparation of the original RILGP Credit” (p.4). But there have not been any “mechanisms for consultation” of indigenous peoples put in place during preparation or any other stage of RILGP. There is no such thing today. The screening study was a singular effort with the main objective to determine whether or not OD 4.20 applies to Highland Peoples in 4 provinces. No consultations of indigenous peoples have taken place since in any province.

It is also claimed in the safeguards sheet that

“relevant documents [have] been disclosed in-country in a public place in form and language that are understandable and accessible to project-affected groups and local NGOs” (p.5).

but it only mentions English and Khmer language documents. It is obvious from the Bank’s own screening study and any number of other studies that information provided in Khmer or English language is neither understandable nor accessible for the great majority of indigenous people and their representative institutions.

Capacity Building and Discontinued Institutions

OD 4.20 states that

“the government institutions assigned responsibility for indigenous peoples are often weak. Assessing the track record, capabilities, and needs of those institutions is a fundamental requirement”.

“technical assistance may be needed to strengthen the relevant government institutions”.

The IP Plan mentions that

“the Department of Ethnic Minorities listed 35 ethnic minority groups and estimated their total share of the national population at about four percent” (IP Plan: 3).

Interestingly enough, but this was “in 1992, prior to its discontinuance“. The IP Plan does not mention that the “special Inter-ministerial Committee for Highland Peoples Development” (IMC) had been discontinued, too. The IMC was the institution that drafted the “General Policy for Highland Peoples Development”, the one the government agreed to comply with for the purpose of RILGP. The currently active IP Plan does not mention any “government institutions assigned responsibility for indigenous peoples” that has not been discontinued.

“Facilitation”

OD 4.20 states that

“the institutions responsible for government interaction with indigenous peoples should possess the social, technical, and legal skills needed for carrying out the proposed development activities”

The IP Plan states that

“RILGP requires that district-level facilitation teams disseminate information to villages, explain Seila procedures and ensure that all villagers are aware that they have the opportunity to participate in village planning exercises” (IP Plan: 6).

According to the formal procedures, members of those district-level facilitation teams are selected from among government officials. Indigenous peoples are highly underrepresented among government officials and thus unlikely to become candidate for this position. Moreover, “explaining” Seila procedures requires understanding them and this requires a high level of Khmer language comprehension and literacy. While Khmer-literacy requirements for facilitators are high, knowledge of one or more local minority languages is not among the selection criteria, at all. Selection of officials for the position of district facilitator is formally indifferent to whether or not those officials have a language in common with those whose participation in Seila-procedures they are supposed to facilitate. It is thus unlikely that district facilitators are in any position to disseminate information, explain Seila to indigenous villagers or ensure their awareness, because they don’t speak or understand their language.

“In Highland Peoples villages, information will be disseminated and facilitation will be conducted in the language most accessible to villagers” (IP Plan: 6).

Additionally, facilitators working with Highland Peoples will ensure that they are provided an opportunity to consider induced changes that may accompany various development activities” (IP Plan: 6).

By whom does the Bank think information will be disseminated and facilitation conducted? District facilitators are the only ones who may have the information but without a common language, it will be positively impossible to convey this information to villagers. This is significant because the key principle of Bank-policy is “informed participation”. Without information, participation will not be informed.

It also is not clear what the meaning and value is of “an opportunity to consider induced changes“, even if it was provided. Villager’s consideration of land alienation and deforestation will not make them go away. Villagers have considered those effects along with military and police units already during the screening study, only that the Bank failed to act on it.

“In communes with Highland Peoples villages, Seila procedures require that representatives of minority groups participate in the process of formulating commune development objectives and strategies, and that minutes of the process are taken” (IP Plan: 7).

Who is obliged by this provision? It is very convenient for Seila to “require” indigenous peoples to participate because as long as they do, the outcome of commune development are by definition culturally appropriate and do not negatively impact on indigenous peoples, by definition.

The provision does not mention in what language notes are to be taken but since there is only Khmer and English language in Seila, it must be in Khmer. That means most indigenous people cannot read them. It is just one more step in a process that creates a need for Khmer-literates to control indigenous peoples and makes them dependent without doing anything to either safeguard their rights or ensure any kind of benefit.

Monitoring the Other Way

OD 4.20 states that

“Independent monitoring capacities are usually needed when the institutions responsible for indigenous populations have weak management histories. Monitoring by representatives of indigenous peoples’ own organizations … is encouraged by the Bank. Monitoring units should be staffed by experienced social science professionals … Evaluation reports should be made available to the public”.

In contrast, the RILGP IP Plan states that

“District-level facilitation teams bear primary responsibility for monitoring village-level participatory activities. For most activities, monitoring includes recording of attendance and minutes of proceedings … each year, the Commune Council will disseminate a report” which “each village may review … for general accuracy” (IP Plan: 9).

Not only is monitoring of RILGP safeguards limited to impacts of projects funded with commune councils’ budgets. Given those implementation arrangements, what RILGP monitoring is likely to boil down to is district facilitators recording the number of indigenous persons who have been herded into a planning meeting to demonstrate adequate participation. Attendance records and minute taking only aggravate villager’s dependency on Khmer-literate outsiders. Very few villagers would be able to assess the “accuracy” of a Khmer language report. With that kind of monitoring, there is no way of knowing the extent of negative impacts predicted by the screening study. There is no way of knowing whether or not the strategy to prevent indigenous peoples from land alienation and forest destruction, the strategy the Bank-commissioned experts considered “unrealistic”, whether or not this strategy works. As for most plausible and actual negative RILGP impact on indigenous peoples, the ‘monitoring system’ is more accurately a looking-the-other-way system that would fail to detect if all the indigenous peoples were gone, even if this was the direct result of RILGP-supported activities. This prospect is not hypothetical.

Creating and Sustaining Conflict

OP 4.20 states that

“Traditional leaders occupy pivotal positions for mobilizing people and should be brought into the planning process, with due concern for ensuring genuine representation of the indigenous populations”.

As should be clear by now, genuine representation of the indigenous populations is not RILGP’s concern. Nothing in the IP Plan suggests RILGP procedures are not perfectly indifferent to traditional leaders. The only place where the IP Plan concedes they exist is in a short section on “Conflict Resolution Procedures“:

“in general, Highland Peoples resort to traditional leadership and institutional arrangements to resolve conflicts arising from within the village. RILGP views these arrangements as the most appropriate venue for initial airing of project-related conflicts” (IP Plan: 9)

“Traditional leadership and institutional arrangements” are in many apparent ways essential to the objectives RILGP claims to be aiming at. Only one among them is that Highland Peoples indeed resort to them to resolve conflicts among themselves.

But what is the operational significance of viewing these arrangements as most appropriate venue for “initial airing of project-related conflicts“? Is this a way of saying to indigenous persons “If you don’t like our road, you can complain to your elders“? Neither traditional leadership nor indigenous conflict-resolution arrangements have any formal or practical standing in the new system of governance RILGP supports. Rather, the RILGP supported system of governance directly undermines the authority, effectiveness and sustainability of those highly participatory institutions. They have no role in choosing the road. Why should they want to be RILGP’s ombudsmen once the roads starts creating conflicts? The Bank-commissioned impact assessment in the screening study makes perfectly clear that the kind of conflicts arising from road construction are between villagers and outsiders. They are not conflicts arising from within the village. As a reminder, the screening study listed potential negative impacts expressed by villagers as follows:

• “That some bad and clever outsiders may come after the road is built and exploit the assets of the village.
• That outsiders may come and take their land.
• That the road may lead to their forests being destroyed or degraded by (sometimes armed) outsiders and it will then be difficult to find forest food and forest products to sell” (Screening Study: 136).

Armed outsiders bound on taking indigenous peoples’ land, logging and clearing their forests with impunity because they are backed by stronger interests, they are not going to submit to the authority of indigenous elders. They do not submit to the law of the state, remembers?

“In the event that conflicts cannot be resolved at this level, district facilitation teams may provide additional mediation” (IP Plan: 9)

District facilitators don’t speak indigenous languages. They may not even understand what the conflict is about. More importantly, addressing lawless land grabbing and forest destruction is a matter of law enforcement not of mediation. District facilitators are in no position to confront armed criminals connected to powerful officials and businessmen.

The commune council is the highest instance of conflict resolution under RILGP, according to the IP Plan. The commune council that chose the road in the first place is indigenous peoples’ last resort for solving conflicts arising from it. As the screening study pointed out:

“The problem is that reports from these communities to higher responsible authorities do not always result in law enforcement, particularly where loggers may be operating with armed police or military units” (Screening Study: 136)

If conflicts arise due to commune councils being unresponsive to villagers needs, which they may well be given the perverse incentives they have, there is no way villagers could hold the council accountable. If the Bank would have been looking to create a system that does not register the failure of the safeguards strategy it knew to be “unrealistic”, this would be it.

Constructing a Homogenizing State in Addition to “Small-Scale” Infrastructure

RILGP safeguarding is limited, at best, to local development projects funded from the commune council budget. It is entirely indifferent to impacts from the kind of governance system RILGP helps setting up. OD 4.20 identifies indigenous peoples and their vulnerability by the “presence of customary social and political institutions“. And indeed the screening study demonstrates in great detail that Cambodia’s Highland Peoples are distinct cultures embodied in more or less complete sets of societal institutions operating in those distinct languages at least until recently and regulating almost the complete range of social life in the community based on customary law and practice in a rather effective, responsive, participatory, fair and equitable manner.

It is on these highly functional indigenous systems of governance, management and decision-making, on the institutional foundation of what makes highlander societies distinct and vulnerable, that RILGP helps superimposing a foreign system of governance, mandated with doing what indigenous institutions had been doing fairly successfully until just then whenever they were left to. The new set of institutions directly compete with indigenous institutions and undermine their authority. Those institutions have behind them the coercive power of the state and the ‘law’ to override any pre-existing institutions and rules, or more precisely, to override the embodiment of indigenous peoples’ cultural uniqueness the Bank claims to be respecting.

Attempting to limit safeguard obligations to supposedly “small-scale activities” the IP Plan states that

“the key program component supported by RILGP promotes participatory village-level identification and prioritization of needs” (IP Plan: 2)

Statements of this kind conceal the fact that “small-scale” infrastructure is only one part of what RILGP supports. Safeguards document don’t talk about the impact of the kind of state and systems of governance RILGP has actively helped creating. Similarly, identifying and prioritizing needs for infrastructure projects is only one part of what those systems of governance do. Those infrastructure projects can have severe impacts on indigenous communities but far greater than those impacts is the potential damage of all the other things RILGP-supported institutions do at the local and all other levels.

As contrast to the claims of small-scale, consider the following statement of the Bank’s Country Director from a recent press release:

“While RILGP and RILGP-Additional Financing fund specific investments at the commune level, the institutional arrangements, procedures and funds flows are integrated as much as possible into the government’s own structures and systems. This has helped to build capacity directly within government institutions, strengthen government systems, and thus create a strong basis for sustainability and scaling-up of development impacts.”

Rather than accommodating diversity, D&D reform helps establishing the permanent local presence of a homogenizing Khmer state and re-enforces links between local and higher levels of the state. Commune councils are part of a nationalizing system of local governance, tailored towards the needs of the national majority and legally operating in its language only. RILGP supports the institutionalization and modernization of the societal institutions of the Khmer majority culture but not any other. RILGP pays subsidies for maintaining Khmer culture but not any indigenous culture. RILGP makes Khmer culture sustainable and indigenous cultures unsustainable. RILGP provides critical support to the imposition of Khmer governance systems on indigenous peoples and helps consolidating and sustaining them. For indigenous peoples, the development impacts scaled up by RILGP is the destruction of their cultures..

Making Indigenous Cultures Unsustainable and Dependent

OD 4.20 lists under the prerequisites of a successful IP Plan that implementation arrangements “should normally involve appropriate existing institutions, local organizations, and nongovernmental organizations” and that it “should be kept simple“. “Plans that draw on indigenous knowledge are often more successful than those introducing entirely new principles and institutions“.

“As needed, the plan should include general education and training in management skills for indigenous people from the onset of the project”.

“organizational issues that need to be addressed through Bank assistance are the … ability of indigenous peoples’ own organizations … to interact with specialized government institutions”.

RILGP’s own screening study, in particular its literature review, highlight that what makes indigenous peoples distinct from other ethnic groups in Cambodia is that they form cultures embodied in a wide range of highly participatory societal institutions for local decision-making.

In its first paragraph, the IP Plan states RILGP’s objectives to increase participation in local decision-making and support local infrastructure and services. Yet instead of building participation on existing indigenous institutions, strengthening their formalization and incorporation as warranted by OD 4.20, the Bank chooses to support the expansion of a system that overrides them, the government’s Seila Program, which implements a convoluted and rigid planning process with no regard for indigenous institutions, practices, languages or cultures.

The capacity building needs this scheme pretends to be addressing with 200 pages implementation manuals are mostly self-generated, or more specifically, RILGP-generated. Manuals are in Khmer and English language only. Manuals are now a justification for not providing for indigenous language use in local institutions, because they are too long to be translated into them.

The capacity-building needs generated by RILGP/Seila are not culturally neutral. Khmer capacity is needed, because indigenous languages are not recognized. The pointless complexity and linguistic exclusivity of RILGP/Seila planning schemes create great dependency of indigenous people on Khmer-literate lowlanders, who have come in great demand in the highlands, contributing to a stream of in-migration that is in many other ways facilitated by RILGP-support. RILGP is a huge job creation scheme for Khmers in the highlands. Lowland officials put in charge of indigenous peoples, to complain about their low capacity without understanding their language, to master on their behalf an imposed process in a language that is not theirs, supposedly to enhance their participation. Khmer lowlanders can find a job in indigenous homelands without learning a second language but there are no RILGP-related jobs for indigenous peoples that are not perfectly indifferent to the many indigenous languages members often speak.

The RILGP-supported Seila-industry does not empower indigenous communities but makes them dependent and undermines and destroys the institutions and resources necessary to indigenous empowerment. The IP Plan’s second paragraph accurately concedes that “Seila objectives and procedures do not explicitly consider program impacts on the various ethnic minorities residing within program provinces” which is a “prerequisite to World Bank support” (IP Plan: 2). Many years and millions later, it remains as true that objectives and procedures supported under RILGP do not consider impacts on indigenous peoples.

Walking Away Quietly from Peoples Wrecked

Lastly, consider this proposal for addition RILGP financing in form of a grant of USD 36.25 million. One curiosity in this document is that it says RILGP in 2004 “was awarded the Bank’s Green Award for innovative mainstreaming of the Bank’s environment and social safeguard requirements into local-level government systems” (p.9). What RILGP does innovatively indeed is mainstreaming indigenous peoples into local-level government systems and assimilating them into Khmer culture. RILGP is a disgrace for any award related to social safeguards. That the Bank considers RILGP some sort of best practice is telling about the sincerity of the Bank’s commitment to respecting indigenous peoples’ rights.

The rationale provided for seeking additional funding is stated on page 2, to “help finance the costs associated with scaled-up activities to enhance the impact of this well-performing project” and to “support expanding the project area from 15 provinces to 23 provinces“. In contrast, consider the footnote on page 6. It states, though indirectly, that Ratanakiri Province has been excluded from future RILGP-support, supposedly by the government, “in view of the significant amount of other donor funding targeting Ratanakiri Province“.

This rationalization for supporting all but provinces but Ratanakiri is profoundly implausible. By this logic, the Bank would not be in Cambodia. There are significant amounts of other donor funding in Cambodia and in any one of the country’s provinces. Moreover, the very point of this proposal is seeking additional funding to scale up activities. If there is additional funding in Ratanakiri it is all the better because it helps enhancing project impact as the Bank proposes. It is not a reason to walk away. The other rationale for additional funding is to support project expansion to other provinces, to increase the number of target provinces. Adding 8 additional provinces while dropping support to Ratanakiri, one of the longest-standing RILGP provinces, directly contradicts the rationale of the entire proposal.

What would much better explain the desire to get rid of Ratanakiri is to get rid of indigenous peoples safeguard obligations. RILGP’s IP Plan considers that there are 120.000 indigenous people in Cambodia and the screening study suggests that 68,457 of them live in Ratanakiri. By dropping just this one province, RILGP can get rid of well more than half of all the indigenous people it is obliged to protect and the greatest number of indigenous groups in any one province. As it happens, Ratanakiri is also the province where indigenous peoples most strongly objected to RILGP implementation arrangements. It is also one of only 4 provinces on which RILGP’s claim of indigenous peoples consent and broad support is based.

No matter what the rationale is for RILGP to discontinue support to Ratanakiri, and Ratanakiri only, it is the single one province in which protection for distinct indigenous cultures is most urgently and visibly needed. Ratanakiri is the province in which societal institutions that are indigenous cultures are more intact and complete and where the greatest proportion of indigenous peoples does not speak Khmer.

This is all painfully clear from the screening study. Ratanakiri is the only province in which the study team used interpretation. Comparing the 3 provinces in which field research was undertaken, the Bank-commissioned screening study finds that

“Results from the literature review and from our own research and observations during the field research indicate that the upland minority people in Kratié and Preah Vihear have undergone stronger processes of assimilation and integration with Khmers than those who live in Ratanakiri” (Screening Study: 139).

“Moreover, related to what was said above about the risk of further deforestation and loss of land, any threat posed to upland rotational and swidden agriculture (mainly in Ratanakiri) is also a threat posed to the cultures of people who rely on this type of production” (Screening Study: 140).

It also is obvious to any casual newspaper reader that the negative impacts of RILGP are most visible in Ratanakiri Province, the province in which by far most of the increasing number of conflicts related to indigenous lands and livelihoods take place. Ratanakiri is the province in which the profound inappropriateness of RILGP procedures is the most obvious and where RILGP safeguards strategy was more unrealistic than in other provinces and where it has most apparently failed.

After 6 years of RILGP’s informed participation in nation-wrecking, after having helped building the institutional and physical infrastructure to perpetuate it, after 6 years of operating on what the screening study called an “unrealistic” safeguards strategy in the key areas of forest and land, after all the broken promises of empowerment, benefits and participation and “all the projects that you want” for indigenous peoples, after having received an award for it, the Bank walks away quietly from indigenous peoples, in a footnote, leaving it to donors that don’t have indigenous peoples policies and inspection panels to deliver on its promises. The agreement the Bank struck with the Kingdom of Cambodia to respect indigenous peoples’ rights in the context of RILGP, now it does not cover anymore the one province in which it matters most to most people.

Consider also the table with RILGP outcome indicators on p. 21. Indigenous peoples are mentioned nowhere and there is only one indicator that invokes the generic term “ethnic minorities” and it is linked to the outcome “Commune Development Plan and Commune Investment Plan prepared reflecting local priorities through participatory planning process”. But the Bank knows from its own impact assessment that the infrastructure project it supports do not respond to indigenous peoples priorities, not least due to RILGP modalities. Thus, the only indicator that invokes ethnic minorities, it is not about whether or not RILGP-supported projects match indigenous peoples’ needs, but about RILGP planning guidelines:

“Planning guidelines reflects inclusive and participatory process by end of 2008, which includes … effective community participation including women and ethnic minorities in planning process”

In the RILGP-scheme, as long as indigenous peoples can be made to participate in their own destruction, as long as they meet their obligation to attend planning meetings that is, the outcome will be culturally appropriate and beneficial by definition. RILGP has successfully contributed to removing indigenous peoples from control over their own communities, from their lands and resources and to placing them instead at the bottom of a predatory state hierarchy. The rapid establishment of its permanent and imposing local presence would not have been feasible without RILGP.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Analytical Stuff, Cham, Khmer Islam, Highland Peoples (Indigenous Peoples), Mondulkiri, RILGP, Ratanakiri, World Bank. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.