A 'Development' Tragedy–Pakistan#3

On Multiple Realities


I travel to another district of town. There’s a big Souq next to unfashionable building where we’re supposed to meet. I notice having lowered expectations by the less fancy appearance.

When I knock on the door, R. opens herself. She runs a small NGO. Grassroots. People-centric, she says, and I hear the distinction immediately. Less in her words, more in her tone. Not program-centric. Not donor-centric. Not framework-centric.

People.

"The society is full of injustices," she says. Not as complaint. As a landscape – this is the terrain she acknowledges without complaint. "If you don't have a people-centric approach, you're not gonna get too far."

I think about my contract. My deliverables. My systems maps that initially was supposed to be drawn from Switzerland, from desk research, from frameworks developed elsewhere and imported here. I managed to circumvent a lot of systemic bugs by writing the ToR of my consultancy myself – but have I recontextualized enough? Sitting in this little office space all of my efforts of grounding my mandates to something real feel tiny. How far will I get?

"If we create more and more abstraction, work gets futile," R. continues. "We're losing time and money. We get cynical."


Every one of her words accurately describes my situation. Yes. This is what I'm feeling. The abstraction of the consultancy. The distance between the framework and the ground. The way complexity becomes " systems thinking" becomes a methodology becomes a deliverable becomes something so far from living people that cynicism is the easiest – and deadliest – response in order to save some honesty.


But R. has found another way. And she knows the terrain.


"We try to help people analyze their situations themselves. And we match it with the governance system. This created several local-level leaders. We're guiding and letting them do it themselves."


Not: we analyze for them. Not: we bring solutions. Not: we deliver capacity building.

We help them analyze. We match it. We guide and let go.


This is transcontextuality in practice. Not pulling people out of their contexts to study them, but entering the contexts together and learning there.

"There's never one reality," she says. "Who knows what is really a true perspective? If you're interested in inclusion, you try to listen to everyone."

"What does it mean to be Pakistani?” she goes on asking.

I cannot answer this. I have been here hours. But she's not asking me. She's asking Pakistan. And Pakistan answers in multiplicity.

"The more truths we share, the better."


This is the opposite of my contract. My contract wants: the ‘truth’. The systemic analysis. The definitive visualization of how disaster risk management works in this context. As though there were one context. As though truth were singular. As though complexity could be flattened into a poster.

She tells me about Swat. Taliban incursion in the late 90s. Militancy-affected lives. Proximity to violence. Comparably less poverty than other regions. Fruit, agriculture. The Indus. Flood relief. Cloudburst.

Every phrase is a context. Every context intersects with others – across time, minds and space. Taliban and agriculture. Violence and poverty. Floods and fruit trees. The Indus carrying everything – water, silt, history, possibility, destruction.

Swat is not fragmenting its contexts. Taliban and orchards and floods and resilience – it is all of these, simultaneously, informing each other, creating the conditions for what can and cannot happen next.

How do I visualize this? How do I not flatten it into: "Swat = high disaster risk, Taliban-affected, agricultural economy"? Into posters that politicians would look at with acknowledgement, nodding with a treacherous feeling of superiority and control.

R.'s approach takes time. This takes presence. This takes being people-centric instead of deliverable-centric. Something I try to do, while the contract is still an old-school contract. I have twenty days. R. has been here for a lifetime. She speaks the languages. She knows the families. She has earned the right to guide because she first learned to listen.

"If we create more and more abstraction, work gets futile."

I am creating abstraction. By structure, by contract, by the impossibility of doing otherwise in the time given. My work will be futile. Not because I'm incompetent. But because futility is built into the design.

Unless.

Unless I do what R. suggests: share multiple truths instead of claiming one truth. Listen to everyone instead of analyzing from above. Help people analyze their own situations instead of analyzing them.

But my contract doesn't say this. My ToR don't structure for this. My timeline doesn't permit this.

The structure forecloses the possibility before I begin.

On my way to my BnB, I realise that I have just met an archetype of sustainable change. Not the buzzwordy kind of sustainability. One that actually works. A pretty big achievement for being here only since three days.