This book weaves together the literature on aid provision, natural resource politics, and the international sources of domestic reforms to explain the failure of Cambodia's ruling elites in protecting the forest hinterlands. Using a single case study research design, the book offers an account of how externally-designed policies have reinforced, rather than challenged, the neo-patrimonial characteristics and practices of the state. Linked to this argument, country ownership in aid provision appears to play a central role in the success of development policy-making – a key ingredient apparently lacking in the reform process in the Cambodian forestry sector.
The book consists of seven chapters, three of which are empirically specific to forestry governance in Cambodia. Chapter 1 opens the discussion with the literature on the politics of aid-driven reforms in the global South, focusing mainly on the relations of power between those who exert external leverage and the political elites in targeted states. Chapter 2 offers a strong narrative as regards the World Bank's ascendancy in the global governance of forests. In some instances, the book makes some implicit references to a critical IPE (International Political Economy) perspective, especially when explaining why forestry reforms appear to fail despite several efforts to conserve them. From my viewpoint, the final section on forests as a salient indicator of how state power is exercised, drawing principally from James Scott, has the potential to be theoretically innovative, but this is left as an addendum. Chapter 3, based on secondary literature, argues that the Cambodian state emerged as a resilient patrimonial state with impressive institutional capacity to manage rent-seeking drawn principally from foreign aid. Drawing heavily on the literature on neo-patrimonialism, Cock brings together an interesting set of theories about states, rent-seeking and the role of external actors in reform promotion. He draws a parallelism between Cambodia and other neo-patrimonial states in Africa, particularly in the ways external actors engage with developing countries in promoting good governance.
The original contribution of the book starts in Chapter 4. It establishes the role of logging rents, and by extension the forest concessions regime, as the pivotal source of patrimonial politics. The chapter demonstrates how ruling elites staged political battles in determining who had authority over distributing concessions and rights, while also highlighting the role of the military and mid-level bureaucrats in facilitating rent-seeking in the peripheral regions. In Chapter 5, the book seeks to examine how elites reconfigured the institutional template of forestry governance in response to external pressures for reform. Cock begins to de-emphasize what initially seemed powerful international agencies, and instead focuses on how local political dynamics – especially Hun Sen's consolidation of his power – shaped the reform outcomes. His argument, though not clearly articulated, points to the technocratic nature of decision-making and the depoliticized manner upon which forestry governance was differently understood by elites and external actors. Chapter 6 is less clear to me in its contribution to the broader theoretical argument, but its focus on the appropriation and enclosure of forests suggests the preponderance of political contention over the substance and phases of the reform. Cambodian elites, he hints, have interpreted the forest as part of a national development imaginary, where its utility lies in nature's capability to ensure livelihoods and sustain the rentier state-like arrangement in the capital. Chapter 7 briefly returns to the four key themes of the book, and briefly explores the implications of the study.
Several issues arise from the book. Firstly, its critique on the role of the World Bank's reform agenda in the Asia Pacific as well as in shaping natural resource governance is not entirely new (e.g. Carroll 2010; Hatcher 2014; Ross 2001).Footnote 1 Indeed, the book highlights the role of power, knowledge, and markets as the driving forces behind the World Bank's thinking as regards the “Sustainable Forest Management” (SFM) scheme in Cambodia and elsewhere. However, its novelty rests on a lucid analysis of how ruling elites in targeted states manipulate externally promoted reform agendas. Unexpectedly, failures in forestry policy have led to more radical reforms to save Cambodia's forest hinterland (pp. 6–7). To a large extent, Governing Cambodia's Forests makes a notable contribution to the politics of sectoral reforms in the global South.
Secondly, the book advances a framework that bridges comparative politics on state transformation and the political economy of domestic reforms, though the extent to which it clearly articulates an innovative framework is somewhat limited. There is a rich literature on state-building in Southeast Asia, which the author appears to have left out, even as resource politics scholars have been theorizing about how natural resources shape political development in the global South. There have likewise been interesting theoretical discussions, notably on James Scott's work on the state and peasants, which have not been used fully, instead simply rehearsing the arguments on patrimonial political regimes.
Thirdly, I note that the evidence presented in the empirical chapters, while cohesive in terms of narrative, does not seem to reflect primary data collection based on interviews or fieldwork, instead merely using several secondary materials. This is a serious limitation, at least from the viewpoint of a development studies scholar, given that we already know a lot about the changing nature of states in Asia (and the global South more widely) as well as the tendency toward rent-seeking in resource-intensive economies. From my perspective, primary data based on interviews of political elites and stakeholders is necessary to strengthen the case study and to triangulate what is otherwise a well-documented story in the book (though I am sure other scholars will disagree with me on this point).
Overall, this is well-focussed research, with a clear narrative and command over the details of the forestry governance reforms, and is well placed to engage with broader questions related to state–society relations and state transformation in Asia. While I would prefer a more coherent thread linking the empirical work and the theorization of the state and the place of natural resources in development, the book provides sufficient evidence to move forward our contemporary understanding of why donor agencies have failed in developing countries in Asia. For these reasons, the book is recommended for area studies specialists interested in Indochina and forestry governance.
