Escaping the rhetoric: a Mongolian perspective on participation in rural development projects

Abstract

This thesis explores how stakeholders in Mongolian rural development projects interpret the concept of 'participation'. While previous research has provided an ethnographic snapshot of participation in rural development projects, none has yet focused on Mongolia – a post-socialist nation that receives significant amounts of foreign aid. To gain a holistic picture of 'participation', this study explores: how stakeholders understand participation; what stakeholders perceive and prioritise as the benefits of participation; and which factors motivate or inhibit participation. This study's methodology involved an inductive, qualitative approach with a multiple case study design. Three Mongolia rural development projects, each with objectives of poverty-reduction and participation, were selected from three different development organisations and interviews were conducted with different stakeholder groups: development organisation managers, field staff, and local people of the project sites (participants and non-participants). The results of this study revealed a dominant or 'Mongolian' understanding of 'participation' existed across the various stakeholders: 'Participation is local contributions of group labour and information for material benefits, within a top-down authoritarian structure (including local institutions)'. This understanding arose from development organisations' emphasis on efficiency and sustainable results and local people engaging with the project as a normative livelihood strategy. In this study, given the incidence and nature of rural poverty, stakeholders prioritised the tangible benefits of participation over the intangible and linked empowerment to tangible outcomes. Development staff prioritised the longer-term tangible benefits (food security and income), and to ensure their sustainability sub-benefits were provided sequentially, mental capital, then physical capital, with social capital built naturally through the project's formal and informal activities. In contrast, local people prioritised the manifest tangible benefits, which initially meant the physical capital gifted by the project, and then later the material outcomes of the new livelihoods. While development staff envisioned intangible benefits as important in their own right, for Mongolian participants they were a gateway to the project's tangible outputs. Four prominent intangible benefits emerged: knowledge/mental investment, 'power within', social connections, and involvement in groups – each uniquely valuable within the Mongolian context. The results also showed that the factors which shaped participation reflected the unique circumstances of rural Mongolia and each project's activities. Economic rationality appeared as the foundational incentive for participation, followed by social motivations that included: widespread, detailed, and positive information about the project; the perceived power, leadership, and organisational skills of the development organisation; a deep personal relationship between development staff and local people; and rurally-oriented seminars and workshops. The major barriers to 'Mongolian' participation included: a lack of opportunity or incentive to participate; the current situation of poverty and unemployment; Mongolia's governance structures, culture, and history; the geography of isolation; the development organisation‟s procedures; and the dynamics of project 'groups'. Moreover, the results indicated that projects which require higher levels of local participation, i.e. decision-making, may face more fundamental obstacles because of the cultural value placed upon top-down, authoritarian leadership and a prevailing mentality of dependence. Based on these results, this study concludes that interpretations of participation arise out of field-level realities, and thus the level of participation incorporated into development projects needs to reflect the local culture, context, and history.