The Demand Side of Social Protection: Lessons from Cambodia’s Labor Rights Experience

In fragile states, recent efforts to advance the social protection agenda have focused primarily on loosening supply-side constraints. But the resulting kaleidoscope of donor-driven projects has often overlooked the need to create a sense of ownership by beneficiaries. In part this is because it is unclear what political and social structures effectively facilitate activism in situations where state-society relations are contentious. We use Cambodia’s unusual success creating and sustaining a labor rights regime to illustrate the dynamics behind one type of social regime change that has opened up governance over worker protections in a sustainable and potentially replicable way.