Analysis of Rural Development Project in Mongolia Using Post-development View

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Analysis of Rural Development Project in Mongolia Using Post-development View

According to Batkhishig (2012, p. 117), Mongolia have been listed as a developing nation by the World Bank. The Mongolian government is determined to alleviate poverty in the country through sustainable projects of development. The most recent development project in Mongolia targets rural areas and aims at increasing the basic income of people living in those areas. The project mainly aims at improving the productivity of livestock farmers in the rural areas. The key beneficiaries of the project are small scale livestock farmers. The main strategy of the project is to boost the marketability of the livestock products coming from the rural areas. The project also aims at opening up new markets for livestock products and ease accessibility to the market. The Mongolian government aims at reducing the losses incurred by herders through creating an enabling environment for livestock keeping. The government approaches the project through following the already established development policy and social programs.

From a sociological point of view, the project matches the post-development outlook of development in various aspects. Post-development perspective seems to dispute with the concept of development and provides alternative forms of explanations. Post-development theorists are in opposition of modernistic view of development and hold that classification of development or underdevelopment is observed through inequalities experienced after World War II. Development that is usually associated with problematization of poverty after the Second World War is declined by pro post-development scholars. Post-development idea of development eliminates the notion of development as a comparison between two societies. Conversely, development is argued to be defined by the difference between the current conditions of a certain society to the expected state based on the goals of that society (cited in Ziai, 2011).

The Mongolian government has established a rural development policy which has been embedded to the country’s development goals. The policy aims at poverty eradication in the rural areas and uplifting people’s lives. The policy of development being conducted in Mongolia may be interpreted in terms of post-development because it involves uplifting the lives of the people living in that community. The development policy has set specific goals for the project in the target area and avoids benchmarking the progress with the achievements of another society. Writers who are pro post development tend to disagree with Eurocentric idea of development where the western countries are observed as developed where other countries are said to be under developed. These theorists disagree with the European conception of what a good life is (Cavalcanti, 2007, p. 87). For example in the case of Mongolia project of development, post-development theorists would argue that the project aims at improving the economic status of the local people to what would be a good life. The project aims at uplifting the livelihood of the rural livestock farmers but does not benchmark the level of expected outcome with that of other similar projects in other countries through the outlined policy guidelines…