From Patients to <i>Pniev</i> : Entrepreneurial Awakenings, Organizational Rebirth, and Social Enterprise in Cambodia

ABSTRACT While the prominent role nongovernmental organizations have played in global governance may have waned since the “NGO boom” of the 1990s, the legacies of this organizational form persist, manifesting in a variety of “NGO afterlives.” This piece examines the trajectory of Cambodia's Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO) as one of these “afterlife” possibilities. It centers Cambodian worldviews and cosmologies through adopting a framework of afterlife as rebirth. Around a decade after TPO‐Cambodia's initial creation as an NGO in the 1990s, the organization was “reborn” in a shifting economic landscape as a hybrid social enterprise. In keeping with the logic of reincarnation—good and bad actions undertaken in one life will shape the next—the organization's new form is inextricably linked to its “before life.” While TPO‐Cambodia undertakes an increasing number of for‐profit initiatives, much of its brand remains tied to its humanitarian history. The strong reputation built during its first incarnation has served as a kind of merit that has drawn customers to the organization's for‐profit activities and individual staff businesses. While these developments offer some opportunities for entrepreneurial self‐fashioning and therapeutic innovation, they also amplify forms of inequality that have characterized Cambodia's post–Cold War economic and social development.