Water Governance in Cambodia: From Centralized Water Governance to Farmer Water User Community

Abstract

Cambodia has abundant water resources in the wet season and a scarcity of water in the dry season. These phenomena undermine the development in this country and pose a threat to long-term development. Hence, the governance of water becomes critically important for the current and future development of Cambodia. Thus, this study is undertaken to understand the current water governance practice, challenges and constraints that prevent Cambodia from managing water effectively, and identify opportunities to improve it. In doing this, the study examines the water governance in Cambodia from a large-scale water management system and three community-based water resource management systems and farmer water user communities (FWUCs) in three provinces around Cambodia. It concludes that the current water governance practice in Cambodia is still too weak and fragmented to address the water security issues affecting the country, and thus, reorganization of the current structure and system of the water governance framework would be required to address long-term water security issues.

Extracting Khmer Rouge Irrigation Networks from Pre-Landsat 4 Satellite Imagery Using Vegetation Indices

“…In cases like Trapaeng Thmar, functionality has been partially improved by the completion of control gates to release water downstream, but the access to irrigation water remains problematic. This is as often as much a failure of current planning or lack of cooperation between villages as it is hydraulic in nature [24]. Our field work has observed significant erosion in canals that have been widened and improved within the last few years, due to the inherent instability of the alluvial soil.…”

“…The success or failure of these structures and the role their failure played in the overall failure of the CPK regime has until now been a subject of much supposition and debate unsupported by field observation or physical evidence. While previous inventories of the irrigation infrastructure have been conducted by multiple sources [19][20][21], these have focused on repairing and expanding the existing irrigation structures and the nature of water governance [19,[22][23][24]. Conclusions about the effectiveness and success of the Khmer Rouge irrigation plan cannot be definitively made without a systematic, country-wide survey of the irrigation projects completed during the Khmer Rouge regime.…”

“…At three water storage sites, containment dams were not completed before the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. These structures were all in the CPK Northwest zone, which remained under the influence of the Khmer Rouge until 1998 [24]. Two of these were large topographically constrained structures, Kampong Puoy and Trapaeng Thmar, with dikes stretching over 6 km and 13 km, respectively.…”

Using AHP and Spatial Analysis to Determine Water Surface Storage Suitability in Cambodia

“…Cambodia suffers from devastating droughts during the dry season (November to April) and floods in the wet season (May to October) [1]. These disaster events adversely affect many Cambodian people's livelihoods and cause over 70,000 internal displacements annually [2][3][4]. Alarmingly, these disasters are only expected to worsen as Cambodia's precipitation patterns change with the global climate [5].…”

“…Irrigation schemes include canals and pipes used to supply water to cropland and communities. Many of these systems were implemented under the Khmer Rouge regime (1975)(1976)(1977)(1978)(1979) with little regard to hydrological and geographic site conditions [1,[3][4][5]. One study estimated that only around 6% of Cambodia's 2525 irrigation schemes are fully functioning, with the rest either partially working or not functioning at all [4].…”