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This paper is about sub-national accountability and planning, where accountability is the central focus and planning is considered an instrument for achieving accountability. The paper aims to understand major issues that affect sub-national planning’s ability to advance accountability and then to draw key lessons for the decentralisation and deconcentration (D&D) reform, whose main objective is to promote sub-national accountability so as sub-national planning to promote accountability has been continuously improved by the introduction and implementation of reform initiatives, most notably the former SEILA programme. Yet, planning’s ability to advance accountability faces a number of constraints.

Each principle of the Paris Declaration is separately and mutually important to achieving the effective use of aid to produce actual results on the ground. Mutual accountability is a significant mechanism through which donors and partner governments commit to being responsible for development results. However, ‘accountability’ can mean many things in different contexts and it is important to define it; a key question is always ‘accountability to whom?’ For example, the donors themselves are accountable to their own parliaments and citizens on the use of their money. On the other hand, the recipient governments are required to be accountable to the donors for the fund and project or program implementation. What can be our understanding of the ‘mutual accountability’ in aid referred to in the Paris Declaration? The focus here is not so much on who is accountable to whom. The Declaration calls for both the “donors and partner governments to mutually account for development results.” Therefore, rather than being accountable to someone, it is understood that the donors and partners are meant to hold each other accountable for something – in this case, the delivery of aid.

Corruption continues to be systematic in Cambodia, and links-in with a number of issues, chief of which is access to valuable natural resources and human rights abuses. Many rural residents and civil society activists are locked in a fight with government over the allocation of large land concessions to exploit minerals, timber, and water resources, often encroaching on settlements and villages. Cambodian authorities, in turn, are increasingly resorting to violence to quash the protests. Land concessions tend to be awarded in shady circumstances to international conglomerates and/or local businesses that often act as front companies for tycoons or politicians. The Cambodian NGO Licadho estimates that approximately 2.1 million hectares (roughly the area of Wales) has been transferred to private developers. This is often done at the expense of local residents who are rarely compensated as well as the environment (Cambodia is experiencing high deforestation rates due to illegal logging, hydropower projects, large-scale agro-industrial ventures and entertainment complexes). A recent report by the U.N’s special rapporteur on Human Rights claimed there is no evidence that revenues from land concessions are used to alleviate poverty.

The report, submitted in accordance with resolution 18/25 of 26 September 2011 of the Human Rights Council, is an assessment of the human rights impact of economic land concessions (ELCs) and other land concessions and major development projects in Cambodia (generally referred to as ―land concessions‖ throughout the report unless otherwise specified). It includes not only an analysis of concessions pertaining to agro- industry (for example, rubber, sugar, acacia and cassava plantations), but also to concessions for mining, oil and gas, forestry, and concessions for the purposes of tourism, property development, and large scale infrastructure, such as hydropower dams.