In recent decades, decentralised education has become increasingly important as a conduit for the dissemination of key skills and inclusion of marginalised groups into the State. In Mongolia, the decentralisation of education and implementation of non-formal educational reforms were central to post-socialist transformation. This research will investigate the lived experience of one key reform, Open and Distance Learning (ODL), an important feature of rural education in the country. Today, the field of educational research is key to analysing relationships of power, knowledge, and identity, as well as entangled with the effects of globalisation, and increasingly market-based neoliberal approaches to social policy. 

In Mongolia, ODL provides the key nexus for conceptualising complex intersections of global policy imports, historical contingencies and local subject positions that people take up within, and outside, of the National Centres for Non Formal and Distance Education (NFE). 

In this presentation, I will introduce my future research and discuss the social dynamics and political economy of how decentralised education is organised in this context. I will look beyond the NFE centres as the loci for teaching and learning by focusing instead on the complex, contextual and dynamic set of challenges that arise at the intersection between Mongolia’s very specific local economic histories and post-cold war legacies, its conceptualisation of mobile pastoralism, and various forms of educational policy.