Towards The Millennium Development Goals: Status And Challenges Of Citizen Participation Of Cambodia

After the end of major destructive wars, the fear of their repetition has haunted the World leaders. While the effort has been put on major issues such as reducing inter-states conflict and weapon of mass destruction, urgent tasks including providing safe drinking water and improved sanitation to the people were often thought to be trivial and neglected.Currently, over 1 billion people lack access to water and over 2.4billion lack access to basic sanitation. As a result, unclean water and poor sanitation becomes the world's second biggest killer of children and account for the loss of 443 million school days each year from water-related illness; deaths from diarrhea caused by unclean water in 2004 were six times greater than the average annual deaths in armed conflicts for the 1990s. Likewise, according to the World Bank, the lack of clean water and sanitation costs Cambodia around half a billion dollars every year in poor health and a loss of tourists.The main goal of this research is to analyze the challenges, whether technical or political, of the provision of safe drinking water to rural community in post-conflict Cambodia. Similarly, the research also aims to emphasize the role of community participation in access to the service, and to highlight the importance of safe drinking water in the context of human security and human development. Meanwhile, the research also aims to analyze the impact of inadequate water and sanitation services on human development in Cambodia and to stress the importance of community participation as an efficient way for the poor to claim their rights to basic services.Observing a case study in Cambodia, the study applied multi-disciplinary approaches with an emphasis on community participation. Meanwhile, quantitative and qualitative method of data analysis will be applied in this research, mainly the analysis of primary and secondary data from the World Bank and Cambodian government. By comparing the services provided to the people by private sectors and government public utilities, analyzing the strength and weakness of these institutions, this paper applies community participation as a complementary approach in bridging the gap between the market and government.In final analysis, the paper concludes that the lack of access to clean water and sanitation in Cambodia is not simply caused by one single factor. It is rather a product of prolonged civil war, migration and baby boom at the end of civil war, and most important of all it is the failure of government policy to prioritize water and sanitation in agenda of social development. Community participation is argued to be an alternative solution that can bridge the gap between market and state in providing basic social services.