Decentralization and recentralization reform in Mongolia: tracing the swing of the pendulum

Abstract

For the past 10 years the Ministry of Education of Mongolia has periodically oscillated between decentralization and recentralization policies. On paper, it has consistently and enthusiastically subscribed to decentralization, but in practice has given these policies low priority. This study attempts to explain the discrepancies between policy talk and actual implementation. Methodologically, the authors investigate local policy contexts and examine how international interventions such as decentralization policies are locally reinterpreted or ‘Mongolized’. The study examines several areas where cultural legacies from the socialist past have clashed with the expectations of international donors. Theoretically, the Mongolian fiasco of decentralization reform lends itself as a case to address issues that have been raised both in comparative research on ‘transitology’ and on cross‐national policy borrowing.

Notes

* Corresponding author: Gita Steiner‐Khamsi, Teachers College, Columbia University, Department of International and Transcultural Studies, Box 55, 525 W 120th Street, New York, NY 10027, USA. Email: [email protected]

The model presupposed the following stages of development: feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism. There is a wealth of Marxist–Leninist literature and socialist school textbooks (both in Mongolia and other former socialist countries) that document Mongolian development as exceptional because it bypassed capitalism and moved straight from a feudalist structure to a socialist system. Other non‐industrialized countries that joined the community of socialist states were supposed to be modelled after Mongolia, which, after Russia, was the second state in the world to have a revolution in the early twentieth century (1921).

Exact name: Mongol ornyg shinjin uzekh tukhain khereg shiitgekh khoroo.

Nóvoa and Lawn (2002) coined the concept ‘educational space’ to explore how educational systems in European countries are striving towards ‘fabricating Europe’ as a result of their new position in a new European political and economic space. Their edited volume contains several chapters that are relevant for the study of transnational policy transfer. Silova (2002), for example, examines how Latvian politicians justified separate schools for Latvian and non‐Latvian speakers (mainly Russian speakers) in the post‐socialist period. She finds that the same schools that had been viewed as ‘signs of occupation’ under Soviet rule were reframed in the post‐socialist period as ‘symbols of multiculturalism’. The semantic shift was a result of Latvia's repositioning in a new (European) space. The concept of educational space, and in particular the remapping of that space as a result of political and economic changes, is also well captured in Schriewer's work on changes in reference societies [German: Referenzgesellschaften]. A research team at Humboldt University found, for example, that authors in Chinese, Spanish and Russian/Soviet journals of education replaced their references to authors from other countries, and thus reoriented themselves to a different kind of educational knowledge whenever their country underwent a dramatic change in political orientation (Schriewer et al., 1998).

Stolpe (2003) semantically frames the shift from an internationalist (socialist) to an international (capitalist) orientation as a move from Second World to Third World status. Formerly acknowledged as a flagship socialist country after which incoming socialist ‘fraternal countries’ should be modelled, Mongolia descended in the post‐socialist world‐system to Third World status. Today, it receives the same kind of ‘treatment’ that other low‐income countries are receiving from international organizations and experts: a treatment that is frequently uniform, not tailored to local contexts and prescriptive in nature (see also Samoff, 1999).

Throughout this paper we use the term ‘Ministry of Education’ for reasons of consistency, except when we refer to the Ministry as an author of a publication. It is important to note, however, that the Ministry has changed its name several times over the course of the past 10 years. In policy documents such as in the 2002 Education Law, the government consistently refers to the Ministry of Education as ‘the main administrative body that is in charge of educational issues’ [Mongolian: Bolovsrolyn asuudal erkhelsen toriin zakhirgaany tov baiguullaga].

We find Lauglo's differentiation in eight forms of decentralization (1995, pp. 6ff.), McGinn and Welch's reflections (2000) in the international context and Whitty et al.'s (1998) comparative analysis of devolution, defined as a shift of decision‐making authority from the central level to regional, district and school levels, very useful. These authors tend to place decentralization along a conceptual continuum with ‘deconcentration’ (strong state agents at the regional level) as the minimum definition, and ‘devolution’ (strong local government with decision‐making authority) as the maximum definition of decentralization. The policy documents that we examined for our study do not specify the form of decentralization that was pursued in Mongolia. However, we did not find any indication that decision‐making authority (‘devolution’) had been shifted from the central level to other levels, and we only saw weak signs of ‘deconcentration’ (minimum definition of decentralization) in Mongolia, which Lauglo (1995) characterizes as ‘strong state agents at the regional level, and regionally unified sector planning’ (p. 6).

It deserves special mention that the rationalization of school administration and staff in the form of complex schools, albeit proclaimed as one of the components of the decentralization reform package, was in effect a centralistic measure. In an upcoming section of this article, we address the need to examine more closely the contradictions between the demands for financial decentralization and the demands for cost‐effectiveness and efficiency in Mongolian education reform.

The 2002 Education Law explicitly eliminated (paragraph 40) private financial contributions for dormitory meals, thereby replacing the regulation from 1998 (Gegeerliin yaam, 1998, paragraph 34). The practice of subtracting the income generated by schools from the annual school budget, in turn, was already ruled out in the 1995 Education Law (paragraph 33), and thus was merely confirmed in the 2002 Education Law.

The national programmes are referred to as undesnii khotolbor, and guidelines are labelled either chiglel or khogjuulekh khotolbor.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gita Steiner‐Khamsi *

* Corresponding author: Gita Steiner‐Khamsi, Teachers College, Columbia University, Department of International and Transcultural Studies, Box 55, 525 W 120th Street, New York, NY 10027, USA. Email: [email protected]