Understanding Cambodia’s weak decentralization: From a textual approach

Abstract

This short article revisits what existed in the legal framework in the first few years when Cambodia was starting to experience decentralization. By using six components to evaluate the degree of “political decentralization”—constitutional guarantee, local elections, recall, popular participation, sphere of local power, and the central-local separation of functions—this review reveals that decentralization in Cambodia was not meant to become strong.