Pakistan's Policy Think Tanks — The Mountain Policy Laboratory

Why does Pakistan's policy research community need the mountain laboratory?

The policy analyst who is simultaneously managing grant reporting, producing policy briefs, maintaining stakeholder relationships, and teaching or public speaking has lost the specific intellectual depth that made them valuable in the first place. The mountain retreat at Himalaya Villas is the intervention that the production pressure requires. Two nights in the cedar estate — the Policy Framework that has been resisting completion, the methodology that needs reconceptualisation, the policy recommendation that needs the protected thinking time to identify its specific constraint: all of these move forward in the cedar estate environment that the Islamabad think tank office cannot provide.