The human security crisis in Cambodia: Is transdisciplinarity a solution?

Abstract

In post-conflict Cambodia, the Hun Sen government has launched many development projects that have plunged various communities into precarious situations marked by unemployment woes and unmet basic needs. A potential approach to these human security crises is transdisciplinarity, which rests on an integration of knowledge from academic and non-academic stakeholders. However, scholars who have situated their transdisciplinary studies in the Global South have identified linkages between local particularities, especially hierarchical ones, and impediments to knowledge coproduction: the stakeholders on the higher end of a hierarchy restrain the knowledge contributions of those on the lower end. I further these scholars’ research findings by arguing that hierarchies impede knowledge coproduction insofar as its democratic, equal spaces stemming from transdisciplinarity might empower lower-end stakeholders (project-affected villagers) and disempower higher-end stakeholders (government officials), thus prompting the latter–in a bid to re-attain their authority–to counteract transdisciplinarity’s potential reconfiguration of power dynamics. Thus, transdisciplinary interactions between stakeholders can give rise to knowledge contestation. I deepen this central argument by focusing on the counteractions of higher-end stakeholders in my own recent (and ongoing) two-year transdisciplinary project examining the controversial case of Sesan Riverine communities’ livelihood difficulties in Cambodia’s Stung Treng Province. While reflecting on my role in this two-year project, I have found that a nexus exists between the counteractions of government stakeholders and the patronage governance system of the Hun Sen regime.