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France, the IUCN and wildlife conservation in Cambodia: From colonial to global conservationism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2022

Mathieu Guérin
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Abstract

The history of wildlife conservation in Cambodia in the twentieth century reveals the tensions that existed between the Khmer kingdom and international nature conservation networks, colonial or global. Wildlife conservation in Cambodia was not a priority for the French colonial administration. It only regulated hunting. While the global conservation movement was expanding via international conferences, local French administrators managed to obstruct the implementation of a conservation policy. After the Second World War, Western scientists and activists sought to establish reserves, particularly to protect a new species of wild cattle, the kouprey. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), through the notable efforts of Harold Coolidge, succeeded in convincing Prince Sihanouk to adopt such a policy in the 1960s. However, although 12 per cent of the kingdom's land was protected, funding and means for conservation remained largely inadequate. The war put an end to all conservation programmes. The IUCN renewed its efforts in the 1980s successfully establishing a network of protected areas in Cambodia in 1993. The various twentieth-century Cambodian wildlife conservation policies, which all imposed external models, often without prior adequate field studies or involvement of local populations, have failed to prevent emblematic species from disappearing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 1-2 , June 2022 , pp. 183 - 208
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Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2022

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank the IUCN Library in Gland, the IUCN office in Bangkok, the FFI office, the Ministry of Environment and the National Archives of Cambodia in Phnom Penh. Mok Mareth, Jeffrey McNeely, Khing Hoc Dy and David Ashwell provided valuable information. Gerard Sasges, Guillaume Blanc, Violette Pouillard and two anonymous reviewers from JSEAS offered generous insights to improve this article. Kasha Vande and Dayaneetha De Silva checked and edited the English language. This research was funded by ANR (CE 27) PANSER and the NUS-USPC Grant ‘Governing Southeast Asian nature’.

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89 Species 4 (1984): 26. Species is the newsletter of IUCN's Species Survival Commission.

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91 Jeffrey McNeely, pers. comm. June 2020.

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93 Mok Mareth, pers. comm., Sept. 2019.

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101 Schleper, Planning, pp. 75–80, 175, 182. This centralised technocratic approach to conservation was still underlining the ‘Corbett Action Plan for protected areas of the Indomalayan realm’ drawn up by the IUCN's commission on PAs in 1985. Ian Baird (‘Controlling the margins’) studied its consequences for the people of the Virachey National Park in northeastern Cambodia. Cambodia was not an isolated case, as shown by Guillaume Blanc's research in Ethiopia, L'invention du capitalisme vert: Pour en finir avec le mythe de l'Eden africain (Paris: Flammarion, 2020); Guillaume Blanc, Une histoire environnementale de la nation: Regards croisés sur les parcs nationaux du Canada, d’Éthiopie et de France (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015).

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107 Cambodia became again a member of the IUCN in 2020.