Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Monograph series, no. 131. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2016. xx, 302 pp. (Tables, map.) US$32.00, paper. ISBN 978-87-7694-167-3.
Worldwide, the remaining natural resources in post-conflict societies are both blessed and cursed. Cambodia’s forests appear cursed, given their inexorable rate of depletion. Andrew Cock’s Governing Cambodia’s Forests thoroughly delves into the issue, interrogating not only the role of the ruling elites’ bargaining power vis-à-vis a forestry policy prescribed by Western donors, but also the elites’ subjugation of this policy. The elites’ ability to manipulate policy for their respective interests represents a failure of the external initiative to protect natural resources. Cock makes these arguments over seven chapters, spanning theoretical perspectives to empirical evidence, and including forest governance practices in other tropical nations for a point of comparison.
In chapter 1, Cock vividly introduces pertinent theoretical and contextual viewpoints underpinning the transformation of forest governance and foreign aid reform by critically questioning policy prescriptions, such as the Washington Consensus and structural adjustments all the way to the aid recipient countries’ ownership of reforms initiated by the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and Western donors. In the era of neoliberalism, he postulates that the paradox of the external induction of forestry reform is, under a good governance rubric, reforming the aid recipients’ market system.
Chapter 2 surveys the trend of international efforts to impose conditionality to aid with the aim of ensuring “sustainable forest management,” which Cock criticizes as merely an effort by aid givers towards legalising for-profit logging, which in fact benefits the elites who influence forestry policies.
Chapter 3 traces what is often written on Cambodia’s political economy in relation to foreign aid and the prescriptions for policy reform. Drawing on existing literature, Cock asserts that since Cambodia’s state power is channelling rent to the ruling class, foreign aid and loans, including those from China, are in fact a conducive factor for the autonomy of the rulers to resist external pressures for reform. As the country is known as a façade democracy, Cock argues that Cambodia’s rulers have, to a certain degree, co-opted the suggested policy reforms to maintain external financial support.
Similar to what has been written on illicit logging in Cambodia, chapter 4 examines the timber boom and pressure for forest policy reform. What is interesting is that Cock carefully illuminates two phases of timber extraction: before 1993 in connection with Thailand, and after 1993 with Cambodia’s coalition government. He addresses how power contestation and coalition among the two main parties after the 1991 and 1998 elections eventually exacerbated the illegal logging. For instance, even as the volume of timber exports increased significantly from 1981 to 1998, the tax revenue collected by the government was insufficient. This compelled the IMF and the WB to either cancel or suspend loans with the country until an agreement on forestry policy reform was reached.
Drawing on Cambodia’s everyday practice of evading regulatory enforcement, chapter 5 demonstrates how the ruling elites eschew policy enforcement in order to retain economic rent. Cock asserts that, however, that political legitimacy is a vital factor which influences the political elites and ruling party to adopt a certain forestry policy reform. Instead of cancelling forest contracts, as demanded by the donors, the licenses were transferred between the ruling elites, and some were later converted into agricultural plantations. While the chapter focuses on “extraction,” it fails to trace and provide evidence at what volume individual elites have been involved in rent extraction. A study published just a year before this book reveals how one elite extracted millions of dollars (US), perhaps as much as billions from forests and paid US$1 million in tax per month to the prime minister’s family (Sarah Milne, “Cambodia’s Unofficial Regime of Extraction: Illicit Logging in the Shadow of Transnational Governance and Investment,” Critical Asian Studies, 47, no. 2 [2015]). This study should have been referenced to strengthen the argument of the book.
Strategies to shirk the prescribed forestry policy are further discussed in chapter 6, examining new patterns of rent extraction, from forest concessions to enclosure of forestland, known as infamous economic land concessions (ELC). Cases of converting forest to ELC are illustrated, but Cock appears to not calculate the amount of rent extracted from these processes to confirm this argument, although he asserts that ELC is an excuse for timber extraction from nearby forests. In fact, it is estimated that about US$100,000 could be extracted per hectare of evergreen forestland (Sarah Milne, “Cambodia’s Unofficial Regime of Extraction”).
Finally, Cock compares Cambodia’s case to other tropical forest conservation efforts. As agreed by other political economists, he argues that the international policy prescriptions underestimated the propensities of the ruling elites. While he suggests that forestry policy should be enacted to enhance the autonomy of the forest dwelling communities to ensure sustainable forest management, this suggestion appears to suffer from his scant discussion on the roles of NGOs or on donors’ approaches to community forests (CF). As my study has confirmed, a number of CFs established by NGOs were later appropriated by the government’s ELC and land titling policy, indicating a relative failure and unsustainable approach (Young Sokphea, “Challenges and practices towards sustainability,” in K. Brickell and S. Springer, eds., Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia, London: Routledge, 2016, 111–122).
Regardless of the scant attention paid to the detailed dynamics of rent extraction from timber at the ground level, Governing Cambodia’s Forests touches on interesting and sensitive topics in Cambodia. It is a highly resourceful and valuable contribution to the literature on the political economy of foreign intervention in natural resources and forestry policy reform in tropical, patrimonial states whose rulers rely on the country’s natural resources to buttress their regime. Written in an accessible way, those in the field of politics, international development, and natural resource governance, as well as NGO workers and policy makers, will enjoy reading this well-presented and researched book.
Sokphea Young
University College London, London, United Kingdom