Speaking (or Not) for Mongolia

Having recently studied abroad in Mongolia, I was happily startled when the country’s president, Nambaryn Enkhbayar, came to campus as part of our World Leaders Forum. He spoke comprehensively, if formulaically, about the new “National Development Strategy,” yet never once made note of how strongly international financial institutions (IFI’s) like the World Bank influenced these new policies. In the question-and-answer session, I questioned the president on this point, suggesting that the government should renegotiate its relationship with IFI’s, especially since the policies of IFI’s in the early 1990s, in order to affect a transition from a Soviet economy to a privatized one, wrought a devastating drop in living standards that continues today. The president’s answer was brief. IFI’s are extremely difficult to work with, he said, but they will continue to be an integral part of development in Mongolia.

In my opinion, the president’s remarks were extremely insufficient, ignoring a large body of work (academic and otherwise) that suggests IFI’s to be very much complicit in the problems Mongolia has faced since its economic transition. Columbia’s own faculty member Morris Rossabi argues in his book Modern Mongolia that the World Bank and others construe development in the narrowest sense of economic practice, ignoring the vast, and often negative, social and political implications of their work. In my own research on transport development in Mongolia (as a window on broader development discourse), I found Professor Rossabi’s arguments convincing—which suggests, perhaps, that the extremely powerful pressure IFI’s exert on policy formulation and implementation should be re-examined.

Unfortunately, I think it’s unlikely that the Mongolian government will rethink its reliance on IFI’s, and not only because of the large sums of aid these groups provide. The reality, at least as I saw it while in Mongolia, is a bit more complicated. In a meeting at the World Bank, I sat in the conference room as T. Tumentsogt, the Bank’s chief expert on transport development explained to me the basics of his staff’s approach to improving Mongolia’s road network. He talked about objectives, namely connectivity between markets, and he talked about challenges, which all basically related to funding. He emphasized the precise, technical elements of his staff’s work: they are economists, after all, and so they practice economics.

After the meeting ended, I stood looking out of the conference room’s wall-to-wall windows. The World Bank office, for what it is worth, is in the MCS Building, one of the Mongolian capital’s most “Western” office buildings, along with both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). An espresso shop sits on the ground floor aside a computer store (one of few in Mongolia), a de facto gallery of modern art adorns the walls of its central stairway, and glass panels and business suits dominate the scene of the office’s interior. Clearly the World Bank has made no attempt to situate itself within Mongolia’s cultural milieu; it works, as it were, “from the outside,” expressing deeply something of how Mongolian elites—political, technical, and otherwise—imagine a modernized nation.

What is this modernity? When one takes the elevator to visit the World Bank, a mechanized voice announces the top level of the building not only in English, but in an American accent: “Fifth floor.” The voice is cool and composed, for development is still seen, especially by its practitioners, as a civilizing process.

In Mongolia, then, the “development apparatus,” to use the Stanford anthropologist James Ferguson’s term, is the province of a complicated cultural imagination—not the kind of thing to disappear, or even recede, at the hands of a few scholarly criticisms. But this doesn’t mean that powerful actors like President Enkhbayar should be excused when they lazily accept and take for granted the role of IFI’s in Mongolia. In 2002, the Mongolian Parliament delayed approval of the annual budget—it would not even consider voting—until the IMF’s country representative had returned to Mongolia.

I remember one afternoon in the capital when I had coffee with T. Undarya, a Mongolian political consultant and activist. She told me that as long as Mongolia depends on foreign experts, on IFI’s and multinational consulting companies, the idea of independence will ring a little false. The expert intervenes; the expert initiates a power dynamic. When Mongolia emerged from Soviet rule in the 1990s, in a way, one form of dependency was traded for another. In Mongolia, privatization is the new socialism.

In Davis Auditorium, then, when President Enkhbayar said Mongolia will not change its relationship with IFI’s, who is he speaking for? Does he speak for Mongolians, for the Mongolian government, or for the wishes of the World Bank? Is he giving voice to a hopeful politics of development, or to the latest era of Mongolian subjugation? In this sense, I suppose I am merely another foreigner, a Western student with too much faith in my own words. I also cannot speak for Mongolians.

What I do think I can say is that development in Mongolia—development in so much of the world today—remains extremely complex, a fraught package of hope and desire, of fear and alienation.

Indeed, one of my most compelling conversations about development took place not in a coffee shop or an office building, but in a yurt on the rim of a remote valley on the northern edge of the Gobi Desert. There, as the sun waned and dinner preparations began, my host mother turned to me with a smile when I asked her what development means to her. “We used to have a candle,” she said. “Now we have a lightbulb.”

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in anthropology.
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