A 'Development' Tragedy-Pakistan#8

On Problems That Won't Be Solved

I sent the email to the superior, with everyone else in cc. I asked them to make statements, yet instead of any answer, a meeting invite came. They are very aware of leaving no traces. All of the days until now were a mess. My wellbeing is strongly affected. "But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever," Murakami wrote. I am wounded too. I acknowledge that. And yet – here is the terrible thing – I think staring at wounds might be more honest than pretending we can stitch them with five-day workshops and infographics. "Clients stay with the consultant who solves problems." Someone said this to me someday, casually, as though it were wisdom. I wanted to ask but was too late: what if the problem is that we keep solving problems?


Let's see how it goes. They can demand obedience to process, but they cannot make the complexity smaller.

On What I Came For [Retrospect]

Later that day, there was the meeting with their boss. Virtual. Three of them, one of me. Coordination, they called the purpose of the meeting. Clarification.

I tried to explain. Again. How systems work emerges. How narratives reveal themselves through relationship. How the detective work this requires differs from linear production. How I had all of that written in the ToR and then the bid.

I watched their faces on the screen. Professional. Increasingly firm.


"You're a consultant," one said. "Not here to reform this organisation."

Yes. But also: no. I got contracted as a systemic consultant, allowed to critique their own institution by written ToR. Yet as becoming apparent, their ToR department had read the bid – they hadn’t.

I think about what I wrote in my proposal. I took my time – two unpaid days – so the words were specific: emergent, systemic, mission-based. Not just methodology. A stance. An ethic.

I wrote: "I work emergently. I work mission-based. This is how I bring different approaches into development cooperation."

They accepted this. Signed the contract. And now – 


If what I came to do requires conditions the structure cannot provide [yet promised] – then what exactly did I come for?

"If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you." Kafka wrote this to himself. A note. A reminder from his former self to his future self, the one who might be tempted to compromise, to cave, to convert to the religion of mediocrity.

"We need deliverables." "We need you to report more." "We need you to work within the time allocated." "We need you to understand your role."

Every "need" a closing. Every clarification a constraint.

In the meeting I tried to say: I feel like my wings are being clipped.

They heard: complaint. Resistance. Lack of cooperation. Maybe I am bad at explaining things. What they said back: "We need to know where you are. What you're doing. How much time you're spending on what."

What I heard: We hired you to be different but we need you to be the same.

One of them said something I keep turning over: "You were given the opportunity to write your own terms of reference. We couldn't know what you needed. We trusted you to tell us."

This is true. And also: they used those terms unchanged. No quantitative deliverables. No adaptation to context. Just: let's see what he does.

So who compromised what, exactly?

I wrote the ToR asking for conditions I knew were necessary. They accepted them without providing those conditions.

If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you.

What did I come for?

Not to produce graphics from Switzerland based on desk research. Not to translate complexity into simplicity. Not to make twenty days look like enough time to understand what takes years.

I came to give voice. To show interdependency. To make visible what gets lost in the flattening.

But the structure that brought me here is the structure doing the flattening.

So either I adapt – clip my own wings, accept the constraints, produce what can be produced under impossible conditions –

Or I name the impossibility. Show the breaking instead of hiding it. Let the education be more important than the deliverable.

Gregory Bateson said this in 1975: "It may be better to sacrifice a lot of issues rather than cover up the whole logic of the situation. The education may be more important."

In the meeting, one of them said: "You seem to feel like we're trying to control you."

Yes. Because you are. The question is whether that control is pathological or necessary.

From their perspective: necessary. The project has timelines, outputs, accountability structures. A consultant who works emergently is a risk.

From mine: pathological. Because the control makes impossible the thing I was hired to do.

We're both right. That's the tragedy. The structure selects for control. I'm allergic to it. We were never going to work.

There was a moment – I remember it clearly – when I said: "I need trust that I'm doing my job well. When I feel controlled instead of enabled, it becomes very difficult."

Silence. Then: "We understand. But we also need to understand what you're doing."

Translation: Trust, but verify. Actually, mostly verify.

And I get it. I really do. They have bosses. Budgets being reviewed by politicians. Reputations. They can't just let a consultant disappear into "emergent process" and hope something good comes out. But funny enough, they accepted my ToR and subsequent bid attempting the exact opposite.

If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you.

The former self who wrote that proposal – wild and optimistic and convinced this time would be different – he didn't send me here to compromise.

He sent me to show what's possible when you honor complexity. When you let systems reveal themselves. When you work with the grain of how understanding actually forms.

My current self – tired and frustrated and sitting in Islamabad – is being asked to show what's possible.

After the meeting I sat for a long time. The screen dark. The air conditioning humming.

I thought about robots. About people performing parts so well they forget they're performing. About how the system selects for this, rewards it, calls it professional.

I thought about what it costs to refuse the part. The concerned meetings. The suggestions that maybe I don't understand my role. The implication that cooperation means compliance.

I thought about Kafka, writing to himself. Catching the hijacker before the hijacking is complete.


And I decided.

If this is what they came for – deliverables produced under conditions that make them meaningless – then I didn't send for them.

I will not complete the contract.

I will not cover up the logic of the situation.

I will not convert to the religion of mediocrity and call it pragmatism.

I will not clip my own wings and pretend I'm still flying.

I will write the email tomorrow. The one that says: the FKT calculation is wrong. The assumptions are false. The structure forecloses what it claims to enable.

I will choose integrity over cooperation. I will let the education be more important than the deliverable. I will remember what I came for.

Even if it means admitting I cannot do it.

Especially then.

Evening: Drinks with Expats

In the evening I meet expats over drinks. The man doing permaculture, visibly carrying his own mental fractures, tells me about permaculture in the Hindu Kush Himalayas. He describes 200 villagers losing 80 people. He talks about glacial lake outburst floods, about gabions barely holding, about the highest glacier density on earth.

"Deforestation," he says, and then corrects himself – it's not logging. It's people pulling out their own trees to save them, accelerating the erosion that will bury them. Water hoarding. He tells about permaculture as multi-point optimization. Mentions budget cuts with no risk monitoring. Climate-forced migration that no one calls by its name.


He is trying. He is wounded and trying. I notice that I respect him.

What is practical here so I can support him? To offer a graphic that makes this legible to bureaucrats in air-conditioned offices? To translate a living catastrophe into a two-dimensional story with a beginning, middle, and solution?

The expats drinking with us I dislike for their naivety. One talks to me about climate change and how she is interested to change her career from relocating migrants to relocating internally displaced people. She does not notice that she opportunistically adapts to a wrongly managed solution-onthology. I want to leave. Yet leaving a group, even temporarily, feels challenging. It is nice to belong, especially in a context where much is foreign to me. Yet at the same time, grasping on to belonging to sick modalities of living schisms me inside. That is my trauma speaking. I know this. It does not make it less true. We are social animals pretending to be autonomous agents. The group can be short-lived, transactional, dysfunctional – it doesn't matter. Exclusion still feels like annihilation.

So I stay. I drink bottled water, while they drink their booze. I try to explain, again, that what they are asking for requires time that was never allocated, relationships that were never built, conditions that were never created.

Maybe practical is to say: I can show you the system. I cannot fix it. No one can. But we can learn to see it more clearly, to move with it rather than against it, to stop optimizing single points when the system requires us to hold many things at once.

The man with the permaculture project is still trying. I am still trying. We are all trying in a world that asks for solutions to problems that don't have them yet, that asks for certainty in natural systems thriving in uncertainty.