The focus of this paper is a comparative analysis of India and Cambodia's sanitation development and the relationship between that development and the evolving political narrative and political economy of the respective states. Despite the differences in size and scale of the two countries, both have had among the lowest levels of sanitation development in the world and both have great disparities in terms of sanitation access, particularly in rural-urban terms. Sanitation development became a major issue in India during the 2014 election that saw the BJP under Narendra Modi, sweep to power. In Cambodia, sanitation development has not seen such explicit public political focus and yet, Cambodia's levels of sanitation access have improved relatively rapidly over recent years. However, in the early 1990s, direct UN intervention in Cambodia's troubled political economy provided a fertile environment for civil society to flourish.