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Annual Development
Review February 2007-08 Foreword This new edition of CDRI’s Annual Development Review, for 2007–08, is released at the second Cambodia Outlook Conference, a partnership between CDRI and ANZ Royal, held in Phnom Penh on 28 February 2008. The Outlook Conference, on the theme Mobilising Cambodia’s Resources—Human, Natural, Financial—for Quality, Development, Growth and Prosperity, again brings together personally invited leaders from government, the private sector, research and civil society organisations, and the international development community to consider Cambodia’s achievements and its future. The opening keynote address of the conference by Samdech Akka Moha Sena Padei Techo Hun Sen, the prime minister of the Royal Government of Cambodia, provides the backdrop for the conference discussion. This is CDRI’s third annual review of critical development issues for Cambodia. This year’s review focuses on macroeconomic performance, water resource management and irrigation as key elements of agricultural and rural development, land tenure and its role in land management, and the policy implications of increased cross-border labour migration, all issues that play an important role in Cambodia’s growth, sustainable development and poverty reduction. The English-language version is accompanied by Khmer language summaries of each chapter contained in a separate volume, to broaden the review’s audience and accessibility. In 2007 CDRI published two major research studies on poverty in Cambodia—The Moving Out of Poverty Study, undertaken with the World Bank, and The Participatory Poverty Assessment of the Tonle Sap, with the Asian Development Bank. The two studies clearly demonstrate the complex and interrelated factors that cause and entrench poverty, and those that contribute to its alleviation in Cambodia, together with their policy implications—factors such as access to livelihoods and employment, ownership and productive use of land, natural resource management, agricultural productivity and rural development, governance, conflict resolution and labour migration. To supplement the poverty-related content in articles in this ADR, we have chosen to include the executive summaries of these two major poverty studies as appendices. At CDRI we hope that the annual Cambodia Outlook Conference, along with the Annual Development Review and its associated Khmer-language summary materials, will make a significant contribution to the broader dissemination of quality development policy research on issues critical to Cambodia’s future, and to enhancing its impact on the development policies of the government of Cambodia and its international and national development partners. Larry Strange |