Expanding Cambodia’s Frontiers of Growth: Maritime Development
Expanding Cambodia’s Frontiers of Growth: Maritime Development
#opinion
Cambodia needs broad-based frontiers of growth to propel its national development. The maritime domain represents a crucial catalyst that supports the country’s journey of development. Fostering its maritime development would broaden Cambodia’s space to uplift its national progress and further integrate the country into regional and international communities.
Why Maritime Development Matters
Maritime development serves as a fundamental sector that can open up worldwide and regional opportunities for growth in Cambodia. Around the world, the maritime space underpins the global prosperity. Maritime sectors ranging from trade, commerce, transport, and resources contribute significantly to the world economy. In 2025, over 80% of global goods, valued at more than 35 trillion USD, were transported through sea. Maritime industries including shipping, fisheries, ports and marine research, generate billions of dollars and support the movement of essential goods such as energy, mineral, fertilizer and consumer goods.
Meanwhile, the Asia Pacific accounts for 54% of global maritime trade, acting as the world’s core maritime logistics hub. The Strait of Malacca is vital, particularly for energy. In the first half of 2025, the oil flow through the strait was estimated at 23.2 million barrels per day, which was equivalent to 29% of total maritime oil transit.
Opportunity for Cambodia’s Maritime Development
Given these global and regional trends, Cambodia has significant opportunities to leverage its sea to promote economic development, expand connectivity and maritime industries. National trends are also favorable for this undertaking.
In the 2023 Pentagonal Strategy – Phase I, the Royal Government of Cambodia emphasizes the importance of exploring engines of economic growth for the country’s development and committing to regional and international integration to support this end. Maritime development helps pave the way for Cambodia in this developmental direction. With more development in the maritime domain, Cambodia would have enhanced relations with more friends and partners and more cooperation opportunities across the globe owing to how interconnected the world is through the sea. Moreover, Cambodia’s ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in January 2026 not only demonstrates the country’s strong commitment to international laws and the rules-based international maritime order, but also marks a key milestone for embarking on important steps for its maritime development. UNCLOS offers provisions and frameworks for Cambodia to safeguard its maritime rights and privileges and to collaborate on maritime development opportunities regionally and internationally.
Enhancing the Foundation of Cambodia’s Maritime Development
With the favorable alignment of external and internal dynamics, it is important that Cambodia prioritizes national efforts to foster its maritime development, starting from putting in place a solid foundation to utilize its maritime domain ranging from the coast and islands to the sea.
Generally, the maritime foundation would be strengthened through a combination of policies, institutions, and academia established with an overarching purpose of promoting maritime domain awareness, which would enhance Cambodia’s ability to comprehend and manage affairs within its own maritime domain.
Specifically, Cambodia should consider enacting a maritime law along with necessary national policies to lay out a comprehensive regime to govern and mobilize resources to develop its maritime domain, particularly priority areas of maritime infrastructure crucial for the foundation stage. Cambodia currently has sectoral laws covering ports, fisheries, and environmental management. The country would benefit from an overarching maritime framework well suited for coordinating and developing core maritime sectors under a common national vision. Such a framework would provide legal certainty, improve policy coordination, and mobilize public and private investments for the long-term maritime development.
Given that maritime development is broad in scope and involves multiple ministries, institutions, private businesses, and stakeholders ranging from security to economic and environmental sectors, a national coordinating institution would be vital to implement with fortitude the maritime development policies.
Moreover, to constantly support overarching maritime policies and institutions, a vibrant community of maritime academia, with specialized fields ranging from oceanography, maritime architecture and technology, and maritime operations including port and logistics management, to marine engineering, the marine environment, and marine biology, should be established to promote relevant research and development crucial for the step-by-step journey of Cambodia’s maritime development.
To support the foundation of its maritime development, Cambodia should orient its national attention to its maritime domain as a single singular frame covering a wide range of sectors to broaden its frontiers of growth. Such national attention is critical to foster a conducive environment to incentivize overarching formulations of policies, institutions, and academia that are befitting to Cambodia’s present context of maritime development.
Having a focused national direction in the foundation stage would pave important paths for Cambodia to promote its much-needed resource mobilization to undertake its maritime development. It would help Cambodia identify priority infrastructure and core sectors of the maritime domain that it can muster national resources on its own, and with the support of key development partners through international cooperation. It would also send positive signals to domestic and foreign investors to support and inject capital into other key sectors, particularly economic ones, that are more well-suited for public-private partnerships.
Strengthening Cambodia’s Maritime Development through International Partnerships
While Cambodia must lead its own maritime development, international cooperations will be a key contributor in building maritime foundation. Partnership can provide technical expertise, institutional experience, technology transfer and capacity building in complementing Cambodia’s domestic effort. Cambodia should cooperate with various countries such as Japan, China, the US, South Korea, Singapore, France, the UK, Australia, India and the Netherlands which all have strong maritime underpinnings in their respective governance systems, institutions, and academia.
For example, Japan stands out among the key partners for Cambodia. A strong maritime state with robust policies, institutions, and academia in maritime affairs, Japan is one of the world’s largest maritime trading nations, with maritime transport accounting for 99.6% of its international logistics. Japan has one of the world’s most comprehensive legal, policy, institutional, and academic frameworks for integrating, managing, and developing its maritime domain. This maritime governance system has been supported by a broad trend of Japan’s emphasis on resource injections into science and technology research (R&D). In 2024, Japan’s total expenditures on R&D were about 150 billion USD. In terms of maritime domain awareness (MDA), Japan has developed a centralized network which aggregates data from government ministries into a systemic mapping system, crucial for Japan to manage and develop its maritime domain.
In this regard, Japan possesses both maritime experience and capabilities of which Cambodia can explore cooperation opportunities with Tokyo. Cooperation on maritime development would broaden avenues of partnership to strengthen the overall upward bilateral relations between the two countries. In fact, Japan has been one of the strongest supporters for Cambodia’s maritime development. For instance, Japan has actively supported Cambodia’s journey in ratifying UNCLOS, and capacity building efforts in utilizing this international maritime law. Japan has also been the primary partner in developing Cambodia’s only deep-sea gateway, the Sihanoukville Autonomous Port (PAS), from the rehabilitation phase to the construction of multipurpose terminals since the mid-1990s. PAS serves as a vital connectivity that has enhanced Cambodia’s growth. Drawn from this positive cooperation, engaging with Japan as a key international partner in fostering the foundation of Cambodia’s maritime development would add more depth and breadth to the relations and bring about mutual benefits for the two sides.
In conclusion, Cambodia should foster its maritime development to broaden its engines of growth in order to propel its national growth and deepen its regional and international integration. Developing a robust foundation, comprising comprehensive maritime policies, dedicated institutions, and specialized academia, is essential to enhance its maritime domain awareness and the resource mobilization necessary to support this undertaking. By deepening international partnerships with key maritime states, Cambodia can strengthen its maritime foundation. A solid foundation would pave important paths for Cambodia to utilize and transform its maritime domain into viable broad-based frontiers of growth for its national development.
Him Raksmey is the Executive Director of the Cambodian Center for Regional Studies (CCRS)
Sreng Hengsey is a Research Fellow at the Cambodian Center for Regional Studies (CCRS)
-Khmer Times-
