Aid Dependency

This companion reflection to the Feminist Resilience Toolkit brings Cambodian feminist perspectives into wider debates on resilience, ecosystem shift, and civil society transformation. Against the backdrop of shrinking civic space, funding precarity, and organizational exhaustion, the text explores resilience not as mere survival, but as a political and collective practice grounded in care, solidarity, and transformative agency. By connecting global feminist debates with locally grounded experiences from Cambodia, the companion text contributes a critical Global South perspective to ongoing conversations on funding justice, movement resilience, and the future of civil society ecosystems.

Focusing on the concrete institutional pressures currently facing Cambodian civil society organisations, this article examines shrinking funding landscapes, operational fragmentation, and emerging ecosystem approaches. It highlights collaboration, shared infrastructures, AI-supported adaptation, and public trust as key dimensions of future civic resilience.

This introductory reflection examines Cambodia’s historically externally shaped civil society landscape at a moment of profound transition. Against the backdrop of shrinking development cooperation and changing geopolitical realities, it argues for a broader rethinking of dependency, resilience, and development pathways — while exploring how this shift may also open space for more locally rooted, collaborative, and adaptive forms of civic organization.

Situating current developments within wider global debates on solidarity, aid retrenchment, and international cooperation, this contribution warns against simplistic celebrations of a “post-aid world.” It argues for defending rights-based and feminist approaches to international solidarity at a time of growing authoritarianism and fragmentation.

This think piece is not a roadmap but a provocation—a call to rethink, reimagine, and reorient Cambodian civil society in a moment of deep crisis. There is no golden bullet, but a chance to build something new and enduring.