| dc.description.abstract | Being poor and yet having limited options to make a living had been the local reality in Bang Kayak village, Koh Kong province, Cambodia, for a long time. There, in 2007, arrived a poverty reduction project by Thailand which sought to uplift the quality of life of the local population through income diversification strategy and participatory development approach. The impacts of this project on the economic development there is the subject of this study. The study finds, however, that the project’s economic prime objective was still far from being met, while infrastructure development, the supplementary project activities, was instead the most concrete outcome. It goes on to present and analyze multi-dimensional challenges faced by the project from different perspectives. The study, however, has more implications beyond the project’s effectiveness as the more general questions of who and how the development should be rise from the findings. Most significantly, Thailand’s project, labelled and promoted as South-South cooperation based on the sharing of knowledge, experiences, and best practices, seems to repeat the mistakes done before by conventional North-South development cooperation: the voices of the poor were still unheard, and it may also impose some controversial values to the poor. | eng |