2025, Vol. 7, Issue 12, Part D

Why has Mongolia struggled to achieve sustained and inclusive development despite maintaining electoral democracy since 1990 and repeatedly adopting long-term development strategies? Drawing on political settlement analysis and the ESID framework of inclusive development, this article examines Mongolia’s development trajectory across seven political settlement periods between 1990 and 2025, as validated through expert-based Delphi assessment. Rather than focusing on policy design or electoral institutions, the analysis integrates power configuration, long-term policy commitment, institutional implementation capacity, and inclusive development outcomes into a single comparative framework.

Empirically, the article shows that dispersed and competitive political settlements systematically weakened policy continuity and enforcement capacity, producing volatile and uneven inclusive development outcomes. Periods of greater power concentration enabled improved coordination and partial performance gains, but these gains remained fragile in the absence of institutionalised accountability and societal embedding. The findings demonstrate that Mongolia’s development challenges stem from political settlement dynamics that undermine credible long-term commitment, rather than from democracy or a lack of strategic vision per se. More broadly, the article specifies the political settlement conditions under which electoral democracies can sustain inclusive development, contributing to comparative debates on democracy and development.