In Cambodia, a generation of young researchers sketches out a more inclusive country

Twelve fellows at the Cambodian think tank Future Forum have published a collection of concrete policy proposals, ranging from tax reform to urban design to the invisible work of care. A rare exercise in policymaking conceived by, and for, the country's youth.

Illustration. A Phnom Penh resident

Some reports are closed the moment they're opened, weighed down by jargon and interchangeable recommendations. “An Inclusive Agenda for Cambodia,” published in February 2026 by the think tank Future Forum, is not one of them. The first volume in a series called “The Cambodia We Want,” the book brings together the work of twelve young researchers — the Junior Research Fellows of the Inclusive Policy Fellowship Plus programme, launched in October 2025 with support from Canada, Australia, and Ireland. Their shared ambition: to lift the notion of inclusion out of platitudes and turn it into precise, costed, and above all workable administrative measures.

The result reads less like a manifesto than a technical brief. Twelve chapters, twelve blind spots in Cambodian society placed under scrutiny: taxation, care work, health in times of crisis, technology-facilitated gender-based violence, urban planning, transport. The common thread is a shared conviction that the most stubborn inequalities are not lodged in grand declarations of principle, but in the technical fine print of laws, budgets, and urban plans.

Taxation as a mirror of social norms

The opening chapter, by Vandeth Nguon, illustrates this method well. Its subject — the system of deductions on the salary tax — sounds dry, yet it uncovers something unsettling: to claim a reduction in taxable income for a spouse, a Cambodian employee must prove that his wife is exclusively a “housewife.” Tax law, ostensibly neutral, thereby locks in a family model in which the man provides and the woman stays home. The author proposes decoupling the family deduction from this status, and letting both parents share the deduction for dependent children, currently reserved for a single spouse. A technical reform, then, but one with potentially far-reaching effects on women's incentive to join the formal workforce — at a time when, according to figures cited in the book, the time Cambodian women spend on unpaid domestic work has risen from three to more than five hours a day since the early 2000s.

A land tax to fund a basic income

Still on fiscal matters, another chapter tackles a paradox plainly visible to anyone who has watched Phnom Penh's property market surge in recent years: even as land values in districts such as Daun Penh or Boeung Keng Kang hit record highs in the first quarter of 2025, the property tax rate remains fixed at a mere 0.1 percent — far below levels in Singapore or Malaysia. The upshot, the authors argue, is that a small circle of landowners captures, effortlessly, a windfall largely generated by public investment and infrastructure, while informal-sector women workers — street vendors, waste collectors, domestic staff, often their households' sole earners — remain without any safety net. The proposal is direct: introduce a land-value tax, distinct from taxes on buildings, whose proceeds would fund a basic income targeted first at these precarious workers. It is, the authors write, a way to build a self-financed social protection system without deepening public debt or relying further on foreign aid — provided, they caution, the reliability of the tax-collection system is strengthened first.

Putting a number on invisible work

This same concern for care work runs through several other contributions. One proposes building a genuine care economy, with social status and protection for family caregivers of people with disabilities; another campaigns for a paid menstrual break to be written into Cambodia's labour code; a third argues for extending paid, protected paternity leave in order to “normalise” — a word that recurs throughout the collection — fathers' involvement in raising children. Far from pitting the public sector against private initiative, the authors also envisage the growth of commercial childcare services as a complement to public provision, to ease the burden on working mothers.

The chapter on paternity leave is worth lingering over, since it illustrates the comparative method favoured throughout the book. Cambodian law currently provides no leave specifically for fathers, while maternity leave stands at ninety days, paid at 50 percent of salary.

The proposal is ambitious: twelve weeks of paternity leave, paid at 80 to 100 percent of prior salary, financed mainly through the National Social Security Fund, with an employer contribution and temporary state support during the first two years.

The authors are careful to place the idea in regional context: Vietnam grants only five days of paternity leave, the Philippines seven, Indonesia two, while Thailand has just extended its own to fifteen days. With twelve weeks, they argue, Cambodia could position itself as a regional leader in family policy — provided a “non-transferable quota” neutralises the risk that fathers forgo the leave for fear of how employers will view it.

Drawing women into research and innovation

The same author, Vandeth Nguon, contributes a second piece on a more forward-looking question: women's place in research and development, as Cambodia aims to become an upper-middle-income country by 2030 and a high-income one by 2050. Cambodian investment law already offers generous R&D tax deductions — up to 200 percent of qualifying expenses — but only for firms holding “Qualified Investment Project” status, a regime the author considers too onerous for small and medium enterprises, 62 percent of whose micro-enterprises and 26 percent of whose SMEs are run by women. The chapter cites a striking figure: women make up only about 10 percent of Cambodia's information-technology workforce, and just 8.4 percent of IT graduates — a rate three times below the global average. The proposed fix: a simplified tax deduction accessible to small firms without the current regime's heavy formalities, with a bonus where the research staff includes a minimum share of women in technical or leadership roles. Tax policy, in other words, conceived as a quiet but effective lever to bend gendered career paths from the point of training onward.

Health crises and digital violence

The volume also ventures into terrain less charted by Cambodia's existing literature on gender. One chapter is devoted entirely to women's health during natural or public-health emergencies, arguing for a national gender-and-health coordination mechanism able to respond to crises without reproducing existing inequalities in access to care. Another addresses a fast-growing phenomenon: technology-facilitated gender-based violence — online harassment, non-consensual sharing of intimate images, cyberstalking — whose authors lament the near-total absence of official data in Cambodia. They call for greater accountability from digital platforms, in a country where regulation of technology giants remains embryonic.

Rethinking the city as a space of safety

The collection closes with a series of pieces on the city, arguably the most visually vivid for anyone who has walked the streets of Phnom Penh or Siem Reap. One contribution criticises the standardisation of Cambodian “walking streets,” built on an identical commercial template with no regard for local cultural identity; another describes the urban loneliness of a Generation Z left without free public spaces to gather in; a third literally proposes to green Phnom Penh through two-metre-wide ecological corridors, conceived as pedestrian as much as environmental continuities. The final chapter addresses public transport through a lens too rarely applied — women's safety — calling for the bus to be treated not as a mere mode of travel but as a genuine piece of protective infrastructure.

A method, more than a catalogue

What stands out, reading these twelve texts, is less the originality of any single proposal than the coherence of the overall approach. Each contribution follows a similar arc: diagnosis, existing legal framework, economic and social arguments, then an implementation timeline spelling out who must act, and when — from the Ministry of Economy and Finance to the Ministry of Women's Affairs, by way of United Nations agencies. This methodological discipline, championed by co-editors Olivia Zeiner-Morrish and Robert Finch, sets the book apart from the usual advocacy pamphlet: here, inclusion is thought through in statutory clauses and budget lines as much as in principles.

Whether these recommendations, however solidly argued, will find an audience among Cambodian decision-makers remains to be seen. Future Forum, founded to train a new generation of public-policy thinkers, is playing a long game: today's fellows may well be tomorrow's civil servants, researchers, or civil-society leaders. In the meantime, “An Inclusive Agenda for Cambodia” offers a valuable snapshot of the issues animating a segment of Cambodia's engaged youth — and a reminder that inclusion, far from being a slogan, is built one statute at a time.