Aging & Social Change: Tenth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

This project is an ethnographic study of aging population issues in Cambodia and the government’s approach to tackle the issues by adopting a long-term policy approach, a thirteen-year national aging policy. The study outlines the history of political development in Cambodia in the post French colonial period and how this colonial legacy contribute to shaping today’s politics and policy making process. The tracing of the country’s early political development provides an avenue to conduct critical analysis on Cambodian government’s policy choice on aging population. The primary objective of this study is to assess and evaluate the impact of this existing aging policy on the target populations. I argue that the endorsement of this policy, while seemingly a positive action of the government in complying with the UN SDGs and the international human rights law, has been used as a tool to reaffirm regime legitimacy or in other words, placing a democracy mask on a kleptocracy regime. Given this argument, I examine political development in Cambodia following the independent from France until today’s current politics under Chinese.The exploration of the country’s political development trajectory provide clues to analyze the original purpose of the policy as well as the feasibility and impact of the policy on the target population. Through this analysis along with the empirical evidence found from my field study it provides the answers to the main argument above that a social policy such as aging policy can be used as a significant instrument to legitimize a kleptocratic government regime.