Main Contents

3.4.1 Introduction

3.4.2 Situation

3.4.3 Policy Delivery

3.4.4 'Do Nothing' Option

3.4.5 Recomendations

3.4.6 Implications

3.4 Forest Lands for Protection - Policy Choice Step 2

3.4.1 Introduction

The recent completion of a review of protected areas of the Lower Mekong River Region, including Cambodia, has clearly identified the need for a more structured, rationalised and strategic approach to Cambodia’s protected areas system (ICEM, 2003). In this step, we recommend that such an approach is put in place within an overall assessment of the role and function of Cambodia’s forest resources.

3.4.2 Current situation[1]

The institutional framework is incomplete and inconsistent, with competing jurisdictions between MAFF and MOE, and a legal framework still to be agreed for protected areas. Forests under protection are managed by MOE as protected areas (under the Forestry Law and the Royal Decree) and by MAFF as protection forests. In both cases there is no legal permanence. Protection forests under the Forestry Law can be reclassified to production forests; similarly protected areas have no legal permanence as they were established under a Royal Decree and still do not have their own dedicated protected areas law. Furthermore, there is some indication that the Protected Area Law currently being drafted will include a “development zone”, similar to the conversion category in the Forestry Law.

There is no framework to establish priorities over these areas to determine which are the most significant nationally, regionally and internationally. The second National Environmental Action Plan (NEAP) is to be developed but there remain questions about its interface with the National Forestry Programme (NFP) also now in process. There is no overarching framework that considers all forest areas; instead, these two sub-sectoral plans run a high risk of further confusing the policy environment for forest lands.

3.4.3 Policy delivery

It has been demonstrated over the last decade that the current area under protection is too large to manage given the availability of human resources and funds (ICEM, 2003:57). These areas have been subject to constant and unrelenting pressure, although now some of the protected areas are being demarcated on the ground (14 have so far been formalised).

Service delivery for protected areas has been effectively contracted out to international environmental NGOs (IENGOs) as a form of ‘environmental concessions’, just as in forestry, production has been contracted out to concessionaires. Similar to the forestry situation, IENGOs support and sub-contract local NGOs.

The nature of the agreement between the state and the IENGOs has been through general MOUs, with general objectives and limited supervision or monitoring of their activities on the ground. Policies have been decided by the IENGOs, which often respond to their own specialist goals and approaches rather than a policy framework established by the Royal Government of Cambodia.

Territory has been allocated between IENGOs through tacit agreements to work in different areas and not to ‘tread on each other’s toes’. Generally budgets for protected area management are unknown within government and controlled from outside by the IENGOs. To a large extent the practice of paying salary supplements to MOE and FA staff has also undermined the institution’s capacity to develop its own role as manager of the protected areas system. Government staff see their career paths through the NGO salary supplements rather than within the MOE. There are serious questions concerning the sustainability of these approaches that rely on fickle external sources of financing.

The IENGOs have played an important quasi-regulatory role and have, in effect, taken over the role of the state as enforcer and regulator of activities in protected areas. In some cases this has extended to commissioning and sub-contracting the state machinery (military and police) to enforce protection. In other cases, they have resettled people within protected areas without due process or safeguards. In effect, in many instances, biodiversity rights have pre-eminence over the rights and livelihoods of people.

There are no voice mechanisms for local people to engage in the decision-making process being undertaken by NGOs, nor is there a coherent national voice that determines the policy decisions for implementation around protection and conservation.

A more focused and prioritised approach to protection would make it easier to focus both national and international funds.

3.4.4 The ‘do-nothing different’ option

We present here what might happen if no changes are made to the current situation.

Under this current context the trajectory for protected areas does not look promising. We can speculate that if there is no change in the system currently employed the future will have the following characteristics. There will be continued and irreversible loss of significant areas of forest of high conservation value. The major beneficiaries from this loss will be the military controlling access to the benefits from land and forest products, and those frontier settlers who get access to the land. In other areas, there will be strict enforcement of protection where IENGOs are operating through their own frameworks with no public accountability for how they operate.  In these areas local people may suffer losses to livelihoods in terms of not being able to access a land and resource bank during periods of food insecurity.

As a counter-balance to this, there is a growing informed urban middle-class. Experience in other countries indicates that with the growth of the middle-class comes an articulate, informed and conservation-oriented lobby that starts to pressure national governments to take control of protection issues. At the same time, the macro-economic drivers in Cambodia are not supportive of the reduction of pressure on rural land resources.

With the potential risks to the garment industry over the next few years and the lack of development of any other major industrial base except for tourism there may be an on-going reliance on the natural resource base for the majority of livelihoods. In tandem with the weak growth of the industrial economic base, new drivers for the agricultural sector are emerging through accession to the WTO. This will possibly drive the expansion of agriculture-based industries onto forest lands, increasing the pressure on those forests under protection. Without increased productivity on existing agricultural lands, together with better value chain incentives, farmers will tend to expand the area under cultivation. This coupled with the weak judicial environment for prosecution of those who offend against laws, means that the overwhelming drivers under the current context are for continued degradation of forest resources and conversion of those areas that are away from international scrutiny and action.

As the Cambodian state emerges and strengthens, there is increasing unhappiness about the role of IENGOs in terms of their control over large areas of land and their role in enforcing national law. 

3.4.5 Policy recommendations

In the light of this rather pessimistic view of the future for Cambodia’s forests we recommend the following actions for consideration:

RECOMMENDATIONS

1.       Development of a common rationalised policy for forests under protection. All protection forests should be managed by a single authority. We consider the institutional options for this in Chapter 5 of this report.

2.      Rationalisation of the areas under protection, with the addition of new areas or sites that are of high significance, but are currently not protected, and the removal of degraded areas.

3.      Demonstration of high-level political commitment to protection, including:

(a)  Prohibition of any infrastructural development in those areas that are currently protected as a result of lack of road access.

(b)  Completion of the legal framework (the draft Protected Areas Law) as soon as possible to provide full legal protection to protected areas.

4.      Establishment of voice mechanisms including:

(a)                         a panel of experts to provide a voice for biodiversity at the national level

(b)                         local management boards to provide a voice for local stakeholders

5.      There are a set of policy choices to be considered:

o              determining the proportion of forests for protection that is desirable (socially, ecologically and economically)

o              allocation of current undisturbed production forest to protection (through consideration of the opportunity cost of moving forest from one form of use to another through its economic, social and environmental value)

6.      Strategic and regulatory functions should be established to include:

o              development of guidelines for protected area management

o              strategy and priorities for allocating areas to protection

o              supervision, monitoring and control arrangements

7.    Delivery mechanisms

Public-private partnerships with IENGOs (for example, through stronger enforceable contracts working within an agreed and prioritised strategic framework).

8.    Livelihood support

(a)    Protection practices should follow best international practice and should include compensatory mechanisms for local people whose access to forest resources has been reduced as a result of protection activities. As a broad policy guideline access to NTFPs and wildlife should be continued, following the recent principles and guidelines adopted by the Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity Conservation[2] which recognise the principle of sustainable use of biodiversity. Access to NTFPs is an important part of livelihood strategies and provides year round flows of products for domestic and market consumption.

(b)    Establish co-management arrangements for protected areas and partnership forestry in adjoining areas; and ensure the draft Protected Areas legislation supports co-management (ICEM, 2003:83)

(c)    There should be no resettlement of people living within protected areas. Government needs to develop clear safeguard protocols for resettlement and set out high-level strategies concerning migration (ICEM, 2003:83).

9.    Funding mechanism

The RGC should explore a range of funding mechanisms to cover the costs of these recommendations, including imposing an environmental levy on concessionaires. Other options include the establishment of an Environmental Fund for regulatory functions, either funded by the national budget or from international sources. At a local level, there is scope to use eco-tourism as a local revenue source to finance local protection activities.

3.4.6    Implications of policy recommendation

The objective of these recommendations is to rationalise some of the ad-hoc arrangements which developed during the 1990s. This includes not only the on-going process to rationalise the legal framework, but also the need to rationalise protected areas on the ground. Central to this process is the need for government, in consultation with other stakeholders, to determine priorities and to regulate and manage against these overarching objectives. This will necessarily require a change in the relationship between IENGOs and government.

Benefits and gainers      Adoption of these recommendations would lead to more efficient protection, with resources focused on areas of high significance.

Furthermore, the development of voice mechanisms both for biodiversity claims and for local people should ensure more effective management of conflicts.

Indigenous people and their forest-dependent livelihoods would be assured through the prior steps to formalise their claims through indigenous land titles. Security of local livelihoods would be assured through:

a)            development of co-management arrangements across all protected areas except for those areas of extreme sensitivity and significance;

b)           development, where possible, of eco-tourism; and

c)            development of partnership arrangements in adjoining production forest areas to protected areas.

IENGOs would benefit through a clear formal framework and contract which defines their roles and responsibilities, including public accountability mechanisms to monitor the effectiveness of their service delivery. Private contractors supplying conservation services could see potential benefit and compete for service delivery roles.

The single agency responsible for protection would have a clear role as regulator with the necessary institutional structures to support the effective protection of the forest lands. Clarity in the institutional framework would lead to reduced contestation over resource management responsibility and remove the high transaction costs resulting from inter-ministry rivalries.

Rationalisation of and focus on those areas to come under protected area management would lead to conservation of global and regional ‘public’ goods with benefits in terms of local and national protection of environmental services.

Removal of degraded areas from the protection system would free up land for conversion to other land uses and provide potential opportunity for local people to further develop their land-based livelihoods.

Internationally, Cambodia would be able to demonstrate its capacity to manage and protect areas of high conservation value and could become a model for other countries to emulate. This, in turn, would increase international confidence in Cambodia and should lead to increased investment both through foreign aid to conservation and development activities but also to the in-flows of foreign direct investment in an environment of fiscal confidence.

Losers       Under the current context there are many players who benefit from the poor management of areas of high conservation value. These would become the losers if these policy recommendations are put in place. These include the waves of speculators and settlers that take advantage of the formal institutional vacuum. Under these recommendations,  the military who tend to focus their illegal activities in protected areas would lose access to opportunities to those areas that come under rigorous protection and would need to find other areas of land that are under less formal institutional control. As part of this nexus of illegal activities, provincial governors also would lose power and influence over protected areas and the benefits that flow from them.

In addition, those IENGOs currently operating in areas that under the recommended rationalisation would no longer be classified as areas of high protection value would lose. Furthermore, the allocation of responsibility over protected areas to a single government agency implies that there will be loss for one of the organisations currently charged with protection of forests. However, this loss in territory for protection would be balanced by a more rational and efficient focus on the objectives of protection.

For poor people the outcome of these recommendations would probably be neutral or even positive provided there was acceptance of the principle of sustainable use of biodiversity to ensure that there is no interruption to their livelihood security. There would be lower transaction costs for them due to the clarity over rights and the proper application of the regulatory framework. The implications for migratory people are harder to predict.

The real costs to the national government would probably increase if there is full commitment to effectively covering the protection costs required for the rationalised protected areas system, but this, as described earlier, could possibly be balanced by a charge on IENGOs to cover regulatory activities.