A 'Development' Tragedy–Pakistan#5

On Robots and Operating Systems

Next day I call with my friend back in Switzerland. "What outcome would you have wanted?", she asks.

I hesitate: "I would have wanted to give this context a voice. But it now became fully clear that the ones who pay want to be the beneficiary – while they kept telling me the beneficiaries were local partners.”

We sit in silence for a while. Then: "A colossal task to come to a foreign culture, with all its history, trying to do anything of relevance. Not to speak of your attempt to redefine the contractual basis of a consultancy with your own ToR."

I reflect. Yes, maybe. My influence is minimal. And I tried my best. But the structure and my uprootedness here foreclose certain possibilities.

I feel the connection between my life and this foreign place downstream of the Himalayas tangibly. We share the same soil, the same air, connected sociocultural wounds. The same fate. But the contractual connection between me and my employers? That's theater, a script I have to follow or it breaks.

"You have to describe in advance how you work," she says. "They don't think about your wellbeing. Most other people would be cooperating like little robots."

Robots. This word.

"The normal consultants are just robots," she continues. "They go to the meeting, don't ask themselves questions about wellbeing. Theirs or anyone's. They do the job."

"Yes," I tell her. "They freak me out. I cannot talk to them. I see so much pathology."

She's quiet for a moment. Then: "Saving yourself becomes priority one now."

She tells me about a beetle. Brown, in Australia. It evolved to mate with a specific brown bottle. The bottle had the right color, the right shine. Perfect match – except bottles don't reproduce. The beetles kept trying to mate the bottle, until they got extinct. "What does this mean for our predicament?" she asks.

The beetles optimised for a supernormal stimuli.

I think about development cooperation. About consultancies. About frameworks optimized for a world that no longer exists – if they ever did. About systems so committed to their bottles they can't see the beetles dying.

"We can't save the world if we're not resourced," she says. "Meaning and joy – that's what resources us. Structure and rhythm. DRR, resilience, all these things we bring to communities – it's super abstract," she continues. "What is that exactly? How do you get it? What is meaning and community? And: do those who bring it have it themselves?"

This lands. Do I have resilience? Do I have community? Here in Pakistan, I don’t. Do I have the thing I'm supposed to visualize for others? Or am I a beetle trying to mate with a bottle?

"Donor legitimation," she adds. "That's what it's really about. Not community resilience or any other plastic word. Proving to donors that something is happening. With all the double-binds in place – what can you do to be of help to this country?"

I don't know. I'm a moisture plant in dry soil. Wanting to achieve something while the counterforces in this context make it impossible.

"Is what you need there? If no – goodbye. But that takes a lot. On the other hand, you could also be a passive observer," she offers. "Or you can try to achieve something in the discrepancy. But if there's no agency for any of that – phase out. Take it easy. Wait for a better invitation."

"It's not the first time you're getting into such a situation," she says gently. "What is here to learn?"

The pattern. I keep thinking I can change the heart of an operating system from the center.

What is here to learn?

"I know your instinct," she says. "If you don't get quickly what it's doing, it's been always bullshit in the past."

That's true. If genuine complexity is being honored, I can always feel it fast.

"Identify people who want to build relationships together," she says finally. "That's different from working within the system. That's creating the conditions for something else."

R. with her grassroots NGO. The man with the permaculture project. These are people building relationships, not performing consultancies. And they need support too.