Abstract
International development actors such as the World Bank have enthusiastically endorsed decentralization as a way of boosting accountability and responsiveness, by unleashing local initiative and energy for service delivery at local level, while reigning in the potential for corruption, inefficiency, and abuse of power. As such, decentralization reforms potentially constitute an important aspect of the new accountability agenda. However, since the 1990s, authoritarian regimes in Cambodia and Vietnam have faced new tensions arising from the embrace of market relationships and the decline in the appeal of socialist ideology. In both countries the ruling parties have used administrative and political decentralization as a means to promote moral ideologies of accountability that serve as a prop to their continued rule. The imposition of moral ideologies in which greed is decried as the source of corruption and conflict has been effective in a context where the political regime precludes more assertive positions on the part of villagers.