By Bulgan Batdorj
Note: This is a post I originally drafted in 2019 but never posted. I hesitated because my thinking was still evolving. Since then, my understanding has evolved, but I believe it is valuable to share this early reflection because I think many of my friends at the time shared similar mindset – seeing mining as the problem (and villains are always part of the story) and education as the solution.
Today, in 2025, I see new research by PhD.c Orkhon and PhD. Bolormaa on education and water issues in Mongolia. I also see many emerging challenges facing the country. While my perspective has matured, I still catch my mind being tempted by conspiracy theories—it’s easy to look for simple explanations in a complex system. But I now recognize that real change in Mongolia requires long-term commitment and systemic thinking as the foundation.
Here at Mongolia Focus, we will continue sharing our observations and reflections on mining in Mongolia.
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Is mining good or bad for Mongolia? Is Minegolia cursed? What is happening with the water sources, are they all depleted? I had an itch to know about mining in Mongolia. There were always pro and anti-arguments about having or not having mining which were hard to understand. The impact sounded irreplaceably damaging yet the benefit was life-giving for us. So I wanted to understand more about mining which led me to quit my job in pursuit of making sense of this Minegolia dilemma.
In my earlier phase of the research, I was almost on the pursuit to find something or someone to blame for the lack of success Mongolia was going through. See, Mongolia is a democratic country, small population and an abundance of mineral wealth. How come all these equate to corruption, economic and political instability and polarization of the people? It did not make sense at all. So, I started my witch hunt – someone is doing something bad.
My suspects could be divided into two broad categories of “external” and “internal”. Those external suspects all our foreign friends, two neighbors, and our third neighbors, their development and policy arms as well as the businesses.
Those domestic suspects were politicians, political parties, and public service. But these people are elected, supported, and tolerated by the public. So they are like the “wart” on the face, very ugly, but are only the symptoms, not the root cause. A very common factor that seem naturally the root cause is understood as the lack of “education” of the public?
The matter of “education” is a big issue at the national level, Mongolians invest in education. Mongolia is often praised for its high literacy rates—higher, in fact, than Japan, South Korea, and Australia on a per capita basis.
The pursuit of education or enlightenment? Mongolia has the most university per person (like the most km square per person). But are we educated? https://t.co/843ER4zJpp
— Bulgan Batdorj (@tsasmusus) August 13, 2019
It became increasingly clear that our challenge wasn’t just the quantity of education but the quality and content. Not only the quality of the formal or technical education but also the emphasis of non-formal education, i.e. democracy, media literacy, health knowledge, environmental education are in shortage. On top of the education, the questions of identity and value are not in the core if they are present at all. Deficiency of “identity”, “value” and “education” are a good breeding ground for disinformation, populistic politic, and coercion.
Every time I pinned Mongolia’s challenges to a single factor—whether foreign influence, political elites, or education—my arguments unraveled under the probing questions of my professors and peers. The problem was not simply that these factors existed—but that I had been examining them in isolation.
I later realized that Mongolia’s struggles are products of a complex, dynamic system, where actors and structures—domestic and foreign, political and social, formal and informal—are interdependent. These interactions produce patterns that are difficult to predict and even harder to untangle. This realization led me to the concept of “wicked problems”—problems that are persistent, multifaceted, and resistant to simple solutions. My colleagues wrote about chronic policy failures in Mongolia very clear symptom of a wicked problem.
Reflecting now, I see that mining, like many of Mongolia’s challenges, is neither wholly good nor entirely bad. It is deeply entangled within the broader web of social, economic, and political dynamics. A search for villains alone will not yield understanding—let alone solutions.