Abstract
The Gojal region in northern Pakistan has a comparatively high level of development, virtually unparalleled in Pakistan’s other mountain areas and rural periphery and representing a significant advance over the extreme poverty, recurrent famine, pervasive illiteracy, and feudal oppression that existed until the 1940s. This article analyzes the factors and conditions that made this possible. Various external modernization interventions by state and nonstate agencies, particularly by the Aga Khan Development Network, have been crucial in this respect. The significance of the framing of such interventions for their acceptance and successful implementation is analyzed for the Ismaili community of Gojal. Findings from this case study underline the central importance of local actors’ agency and their proactive and creative response to the changing conditions and new opportunities created during modernizing interventions. Local households’ mobility and migration strategies, in the context of sectoral and spatial...
Highlights
Modernization interventions were launched in many parts of the Himalaya-Karakoram in colonial times, but they intensified in the postcolonial period, implemented by state institutions as well as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international development aid agencies
The translocal social networks that have emerged during decades of migration have provided Gojalis with crucial opportunity structures to access higher education, professional employment, and off-farm income
The successful translation of external modernization interventions into mountain development could only be achieved by combining the new opportunities provided through these interventions with additional opportunities obtained through mobility and migration
Summary
Modernization interventions were launched in many parts of the Himalaya-Karakoram in colonial times, but they intensified in the postcolonial period, implemented by state institutions as well as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international development aid agencies Such interventions—for instance, in the fields of education, health services, physical infrastructure, business development, and capacity building—have shown different outcomes in different regions (Kreutzmann 1991, 2004, 2009; Joshi 2000; Hoermann and Kollmair 2009; Khan 2009; Sati 2014). Efforts that have facilitated development and significantly improved wellbeing in some areas have had little effect in others, and in some cases have worsened local conditions by triggering destructive outmigration and brain drain (Kaukab 2005; De Haas 2012; Nyberg Sørensen 2012) These diverse outcomes raise questions about the factors that facilitate or constrain the translation of external modernization interventions into sustainable mountain development. This article scrutinizes this interplay in the context of Gojal, which is widely recognized as a successfully and arguably sustainably developing mountain region in the upper Hunza valley in the Pakistani Karakoram, in an attempt to identify both local and extralocal success factors that may be relevant to sustainable mountain development in general
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