A 'Development' Tragedy–Pakistan#1

These notes are the result of my personal documentation of a 10-day work trip to Islamabad, Pakistan. In 2025, I was asked to do a systems mapping for storytelling in disaster risk reduction for the sectors of agriculture, energy and water.

While this being the background of my mandate, this document is more testimony to the challenges of old models of organizations facing the compounding crises of our time. While the background of Pakistan's fate is not fully explained in this text, it is important to keep in mind that the population of Pakistan and non-human species as well have been and will be experiencing levels of cascading collapse none of us in the West has ever fathomed him- and herself.

Note on this text: While this is a documentation of real events, it is held in the manner of a narrational journal. To protect people, I anonymized their names and context. I also never give background on how I got to meet them, as to plunge the reader into the fragmented events as they unfolded for me.

1: Islamabad airport (Image: Lukas Vogel)

Making the Pathology Comfortable

[12.10.2025] Seventy people died at the Afghan border the night when I landed. In Lahore, two hundred were killed. A TLP leader was shot. The news cycled through the breakfast television in the hotel lobby where development professionals arranged their departure schedules.

"Climate is relevant," he said, stirring his coffee. "But often not much gets done. Still, I get paid for it."

The sentence hung there, a perfect example of hard-programmed premises.

"You can't solve the corruption through our organisation," he continued. "You have to learn to set boundaries."

What he meant, though he couldn't say it, was that the boundary had already been set – between the work and its consequences, between the symptom and the disease, between the 270 dead and the conference room where people discussed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I sit there, shocked by hearing him state the obvious – that this delegitimizes the purpose of his entire work. And by how little emotion he seems to feel. Is this what mind separated from body means? The separation of knower from known, of intervener from intervention? Each division spawning the next. And the ‘authority’ many believe to be solving ‘the problem’ becoming blind to its own effects.

Anyhow, I just arrived, I tell myself. Who am I to intervene? It would not be received well if I challenge my interviewees from day one. And yet the odd feeling remains to have landed in the intro of a theatre.

Afternoon

She had just returned from Japan. Then Germany. Now Pakistan. Rome was next week. "We fly business class," she said, as though confessing and defending simultaneously. "I won't choose economy voluntarily. I'd only do it, if everyone has to do it."

The conversation goes on like this. I keep being mesmerized by hearing seemingly self-evident contradiction. And yet have to acknowledge two things: I seem to be perceived as an in-group – maybe as another white German person one could talk with openly? And that the individuals working for the project I am consulted by are operating mainly game-theoretically – in a context of cascading collapse. People optimizing for their position within the game's rules, even as the game itself drives toward systemic collapse. No single player feels like he can exit. Every individual acts rationally within a framework that is collectively insane. The tragedy is that she knows this, can articulate it, yet cannot step outside the logic that binds her to the very system she claims to want to change.

I stop my thoughts, and continue listening to the conversation.

Meanwhile, near the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, and Himalayan convergence, a hotel is being built in alignment with permaculture principles. The owner stands at the top of the slope, watching his premise. He keeps believing in his project, while knowing the news that are no news for any one other than him and his neighbors: that his hotel might never be finished. Maybe August 2026 will mark the end of his endeavor: Glacial lake outburst floods, GLOFs in short, have evicted many other villages already. He has seen the two neighboring villages upstream swallowed by water, watched topsoil erode as residents ripped out their trees in desperate extraction – a last attempt to salvage something before the next flood. The displaced moved to the village that will flood next – to his village.

"How do we get this country aligned with the SDGs?" he asks while he looks at me. I am surprised. The question presumes that alignment is the answer, that the framework itself is not part of the problem.

I try to explain the nature of disaster risk management frameworks. Risk-informed development pathways. Enabling environments for resilience. The language is sophisticated, the analysis often accurate. But the interventions themselves are shaped by the same premises that generated the crises: that parts can be isolated and fixed, that causation is always linear, that expertise can be parachuted in, that locals need capacity-building rather than sovereignty, that GDP growth and risk reduction can be simultaneously optimized.

Evening

I can crash on a development advisor’s couch. We start conversing. "I'm going to a Bangkok conference on climate change this weekend. Not much will get done. Two days – In and out – Halligalli and back.", he says.

He looks at me with an honest sense of confusion, maybe even despair. By the way he generously tips his guard and other micro-actions I could see that he is a genuine guy – a trapped genuine guy. His travel captures something essential about the epistemic substrate of what I had felt in previous conversations. Movement without displacement. Intervention without contact. Knowledge production decoupled from consequence. The system has become so perverted, so multiply determined, so resistant to change that activity itself becomes the goal. Motion substitutes for direction. Process replaces outcome.

At night, I am only one day in and already psychosomatically overwhelmed by so many contradictions. Why are ‘we’ spending enormous amounts of money in pathological directions of change? Not because anyone is evil or stupid, but because the system selects for actors who can operate within its contradictions, often without seeing them. Dark triad selection operating through bureaucratic structures: narcissism reads as confidence, Machiavellianism as strategic thinking, low empathy as professional detachment.

The real crisis, the one that no framework can capture, is that we have built systems that are epistemically incapable of recognizing their own failure modes. The development professional who acknowledges that nothing gets done but that he gets paid for it has achieved a kind of clarity, but it's a clarity without consequence – probably because the structure ensures that his continued employment depends not on impact but on legibility to a donor system equally trapped in its own metrics.

When controls no longer operate – when the message system that should regulate growth fails to generate feedback – the result in biological systems is cancer. In social systems, we call it many things: institutional capture, mission drift, bureaucratic entropy, delegitimized meritocracy. But it is fundamentally the same pattern: optimization processes that cannibalize their substrate, eating through the flexibility that allows adaptation, hardwiring pathology into baseline expectation.

The hope, Gregory Bateson said already in 1975, is that political or economic crisis comes before biological crisis, that we would "tell them to not be such goddamn fools".

But we seem to be goddam fools. The biological crisis is here - and it will hit us hard. The glacial lakes of Pakistan will outburst. More villages will flood. People will move to places that will flood after that. Development professionals will fly between capital cities, generating reports on resilience while staying in hotels that themselves constitute the problem. The seventy dead at the border and the two hundred in Lahore will become data points in databases, abstracted into trends that inform policy recommendations that optimize for indicators that have lost connection to the systems they claim to measure.

This is not a failure of information. Many see it. The hotel builder knows about permaculture. The development professional knows nothing gets done. The climate expert knows she flies business class while advocating carbon reduction. The knowledge is often there. But we have become extraordinarily sophisticated at preventing the pinch, at making the pathology comfortable, at confusing the treatment of symptoms with health.