Notes on Bhutan
Small Himalayan Kingdom, Big Governance Experiments
I missed my alarm and woke up at 3:05 am. The taxi was already waiting downstairs to leave for my 5 a.m. flight to Paro. I slept the whole way and mercifully missed the landing at one of the world’s most dangerous airports—a combination of low visibility, very tall mountains, and a narrow valley where only ~20 pilots are licensed to land.
I didn’t do any research before the trip (very unlike me) because this was my first guided trip. Around 30 people from all over the world joined Edge City Bhutan, an expedition from an organization I hold dear.
I figured I’d trust the experts to explain the place as we moved through it. And they delivered.
Bhutan has a long history of doing its own thing
Our first visit was to Rinpung Dzong, a 17th-century monastery-fortress built on a hill overlooking the Paro valley. Its central tower is surrounded by a courtyard with intricate wooden balconies. This building holds both a monastic body and Paro district’s administration.
Dzongs illustrate the ancient political philosophy of cho-sid-nyi—the dual system—where religious and secular powers share authority over the territory. This dual system originated in Tibet, spread through the Himalayan kingdoms, but now only survives in Bhutan.
Each district (Dzongkhag) in Bhutan has its own dzong to serve as the religious, military, and administrative center, so they’re still actively used by both monks and government officials. This blending of spiritual and secular life is very much a part of Bhutan’s way of life.
We visited many monasteries high in the mountains, including the world-famous Tiger’s Nest (and yes, I was guided through the steep stairs by two friends on either side like a horse with blinkers, counting to five, pretending there wasn’t a 500-meter vertical drop right next to me).
Bhutan has a distinct culture, in part driven by its inaccessibility. It is mountainous terrain with narrow valleys and very little flat land, with two behemoths as neighbors: China (Tibet) to the north and India to the south.
As such, it’s been slow to join the globalized world.
Bhutan didn’t join the UN until 1971, opened to foreign tourism in 1974 (maintaining a high-value, low-volume approach with a $100/night visa fee), and only legalized television and the internet in 1999.
Yet in the 2000s, things started to change more dramatically as King Jigme Singye Wangchuck aimed to reform the country and set the foundations for prosperity. He essentially forced democracy on a reluctant population. They adopted their first constitution in 2008 and enshrined Gross National Happiness as a guiding principle of governance instead of the more traditional Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Then we flew to Gelephu, and I saw them attempting something even more ambitious.
Gelephu Mindfulness City
Our chartered flight landed at a tiny airport right next to a massive construction site: the new Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC) international airport. We were taken through the massive earthworks—it will be built on top of a river—and we had a more technical presentation of the airport, which is being built with Singapore’s Changi Airport International as a key partner.
We then drove to a high viewpoint to see the entire valley where the city would be built. This was the site of a new temple, one of the first buildings to go up.
GMC was announced in December 2023 and it will be a new economic hub about three times the size of Singapore right on the border with India. The master plan is designed by Bjarke Ingels Group: eleven neighborhoods organized around rivers, each designed as a mandala. Buildings will use local materials (wood, stone, and bamboo) and maintain Bhutanese vernacular architecture.
But the renders (although beautiful) aren’t the interesting part. The governance experiment is.
GMC will operate as a Special Administrative Region with its own legal framework borrowing best practices from places like Singapore (for anti-corruption) and Abu Dhabi (for global market regulations), while developing its own cultural and environmental guardrails.
The Diamond Strategy is a plan proposed by the King to control development. It uses a “One Country, Two Systems” framework, where GMC will function as a model for innovation and experimentation to attract investment and foster economic growth. Best practices piloted in the GMC could then be scaled up to the rest of the country. The strategy is designed to take place over 40 years, starting with a divergence in the first 20 years, followed by a gradual convergence back into a single system.
This is a model for leapfrog development that doesn’t mirror China or the UAE. They’re mixing culture and sustainability with development and innovation in a way that drives growth for the country but tries to curtail the riskier parts of opening to global capital markets.
This is where Edge City comes in. The organization brings together people interested in new models of governance, innovation, and community building. Timour, one of its founders, saw in Bhutan a live laboratory and invited us along to witness it firsthand. We were lucky to have people actively working on the GMC come talk to us at our hotel in Paro. Bhutan is one of the few places where those abstract ideas are being tested in public, which feels pretty rare and very cool.
The Buddhist angle
Now I don’t remember who brought this point up, but GMC is also a bet by Bhutan to become a global epicenter for Buddhism, especially Vajrayana Buddhism (the same tradition as in Tibet). Caveat: I’m not claiming they’re explicitly planning for this, but it would make sense if they were.
Here’s the situation: the Dalai Lama—by far the most famous Buddhist monk in the world—is 90 years old. In his tradition, succession requires recognizing his next incarnation. But he has been in exile since 1959. China has already declared its own Panchen Lama (traditionally involved in identifying the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation) and has made clear it intends to control the next succession. The actual Panchen Lama recognized by the Dalai Lama was taken by Chinese authorities at age six and hasn’t been seen publicly since.
What happens in the coming years when the Dalai Lama dies will fracture Tibetan Buddhism. There will likely be two competing Dalai Lamas—one recognized by China, one by the exile community.
There’s an opening here. Bhutan already has a functioning monastic order that is venerated by its population. It has legitimacy. And it has never been colonized or conquered.
GMC could become something like a Mecca for Vajrayana Buddhism—a place of pilgrimage and study. The millions of Buddhists worldwide (and the growing number of Western practitioners) might seek a spiritual center that isn’t under Beijing’s control.
How to develop without losing your identity and culture
The core tension I felt while in Bhutan, and one that GMC directly addresses, is how to modernize without becoming like everywhere else. How do you keep ancient traditions and religious practices when you open yourself to the world and are subject to the pressures of tourism and global capital markets?
Basically, how to have your cake and eat it too.
Let’s consider a normal path of development. A country opens up to the world, hoping to provide better opportunities to its citizens. Global conglomerates set up shop to sell products, extract resources, or manufacture goods. This is good. It brings what underdeveloped countries desperately need: money, jobs, and prosperity. The state is able to tax the companies (and its richer citizens) and with that money it improves infrastructure and provides better services for all.
However, a lot of the local fabric gets lost. Local shops disappear as multinational chains open up. Hotels get built and if popular, larger resorts sprout up. Tourism changes the local culture and puts enormous strains on local infrastructure.
Unintended consequences start to accumulate: commoditized labor, cultural homogenization, loss of communal values, destruction of natural resources.
Look at Bali. Thirty years ago it was a cultural treasure with rice terraces, temples, and traditional village life. Now parts of it are indistinguishable from Cancún or Phuket—traffic jams, Western party bars, and thousands of tourists clogging famous sights and beaches. Thailand faced similar pressures: Maya Bay (made famous by the movie The Beach) had to be closed for years to recover from the damage caused by mass tourism. Nepal, Bhutan’s neighbor, opened up faster and more chaotically. Kathmandu is now polluted, congested, and the Everest base camp has a trash problem.
Bhutan knows this because it’s seen the bumpy paths other developing economies have gone through. Being the last one has its benefits.
The common challenges of development
Bhutan is different because there’s a clear intention. It has capital (Bitcoin mining, hydropower exports to India), and good governance with a benevolent ruler who thinks in decades, not election cycles.
Bhutan mirrors Singapore. Its King—like Lee Kuan Yew—operates with an extremely long-term vision and plans to enact change over 40 years.
This brings up hard questions about our Western democratic ideals.
The GMC’s 40-year Diamond Strategy requires consistency across multiple administrations. In a democracy, this is nearly impossible. The US can’t maintain a coherent energy policy across two consecutive presidents. Infrastructure projects get canceled when the other party wins.
The uncomfortable truth is that certain kinds of goods like cultural preservation, environmental protection, long-term infrastructure, generational planning, seem completely at odds with electoral cycles. A leader who needs to win an election in four years has every incentive to prioritize short-term visible wins over long-term, less popular foundations.
Singapore understood this. Lee Kuan Yew built a city-state that achieved massive prosperity in one generation, but he did it by maintaining single-party rule for decades, restricting press freedom, and occasionally jailing political opponents. Most Western observers would call Singapore’s system authoritarian. But walk around Singapore today and compare it to cities that developed under messier, slower democratic transitions.
I’m not arguing for autocracy. Autocracies fail catastrophically when you get a bad ruler, and there’s no mechanism to remove them. The 20th century is full of examples. But the democratic assumption that regular elections and peaceful transfers of power automatically produce good long-term outcomes deserves more scrutiny than it gets.
What happens when you have a benevolent King who cares deeply about improving his country and has a 40-year timeline to achieve it? How does a democracy whose president has a four-year term even compete on problems that require generational thinking?
Bhutan’s bet is that you can have both: a monarchy that sets the long-term vision while gradually building democratic institutions that will eventually take over. The King is actively trying to make himself less necessary.
Whether it works is an open question, but at least they’re ambitious enough to ask it.
Experimenting with development
My trip to Bhutan was interesting because of the beautiful natural setting, the deep spiritual culture, the wonderful group, and especially because it’s fascinating to see a country on the verge of development choosing the path it wants to go down. Bhutanese are attempting to resolve tensions every society has: how to have economic prosperity without eroding our social values; how to participate in the global economy without being devoured by it.
Bhutan’s experiment poses a fundamental question for the 21st century: Is there an alternative to the binary choice between isolation and assimilation? Can traditional cultures survive contact with modernity and live to tell the tale?
Bhutan’s advantage is having the space to think before acting. Most countries face similar pressures: youth unemployment, capital flight, infrastructure needs. But they don’t have the luxury or foresight to think deliberately about development. They open their economy and hope for the best.
If every country follows the same development pattern, we lose laboratories for different ways of organizing for human flourishing. We lose the possibility that there might be multiple valid answers to how societies should develop, what prosperity means, how to balance individual freedom with collective wellbeing.
Bhutan, and GMC specifically, will test whether there’s still room in our globalized world for alternatives. I genuinely have no idea if they’ll pull it off. But I’m glad someone’s trying.
"If every country follows the same development pattern, we lose laboratories for different ways of organizing for human flourishing." Could not agree more. This would have made an interesting pairing with philosophy group's recent (quite lively) debate over Curtis Yarvin's argument for monarchies... In any case, it was a pleasure to be your horse blinker on this one :)
You are mentioning that democracy is at odds with long term planning, because of election cycles. I would guess that is true in democracies where the elected officials have most of the power.
In the case of the direct democracy of Switzerland, elected politicians are there to discuss and enact laws, propose projects, and so on. but in the end, especially long term planning, it is the population who has the say, because everything can be voted by the population.
In the case of long term planning, most big projects are automatically subjected to population vote (e.g. Gottard base tunnel, 2000 Rail plan, ...). Once it is accepted, no elected politician can undo the voted project, or cancel the funding. The power that one politician helds is more limited than in all other democracies. Switzerland also has a tradition of compromise, which means that parties have to talk to each other, find a common ground, and try to implement changes as best as they can. This is how Switzerland managed to get one of the best public transport network in the world, how research output of Switzerland is high per capita, how the roads are well maintained, ...