Chapter Ten

10 Years Ahead, 10 Years Behind

4 minute read · 3 paradoxes

The Multi-Disciplinary Super-Specialty Hospital that closed the previous chapter was approved by Royal directive. So was the Mother and Child Hospital at Mongar. So was the Bhutan Health Trust Fund framework, the PEMA Secretariat, the basic-health-unit network across every dzongkhag. The clinical talent that would staff those institutions is the work of the next twenty years. The institutional vision that authorised them is the work of a different horizon entirely. This chapter is about that horizon.

On the morning of 17 December 2023 — the country’s 116th National Day — His Majesty The King addressed the nation from the Changlimithang ground. The address was, by the standards of National Day speeches, long. It ran more than ninety minutes. The cameras caught much of it. The domestic press carried the headline announcements within hours.

The headline that travelled was the Gelephu Mindfulness City. A Special Administrative Region in southern Bhutan, roughly 2,500 square kilometres, designed to attract international investment under a sovereign legal-regulatory framework distinct from the rest of the country. The announcement was, in the language the international press would adopt within days, audacious. A small landlocked Buddhist kingdom of 777,000 people had just declared the construction of a city projected to hold one million.

What the headline did not capture — what was, in fact, the deeper structural fact about the address — was that the country’s institutional apparatus, on 18 December 2023, did not yet have an operational framework for delivering a Special Administrative Region of that scale. There was no GMC Authority. There was no charter. There was no legal framework. There were no published architectural standards. The PPP frameworks had not been adapted. The civil service had not been trained. The financial-services regulatory apparatus had not been extended. None of the second-order infrastructure existed.

It would take a year before the GMC Authority was constituted. Two years before the charter, the legal framework, the regulatory adaptations were in operational form. The first detailed master plan would arrive in 2025. The first international tax treaty enabling investor confidence — the Bhutan-Singapore Double Tax Avoidance Agreement — would be signed in May 2026. By the time this book is published, the timeline from royal announcement to operational delivery framework will be in its third year, with the substantive delivery yet to begin.

This is the pattern. The Crown announces. The system catches up. The lag is, on average, ten years.

Tenzin is forty-four. Civil servant, joined the Royal Civil Service after graduating from Sherubtse in 2002, has held postings in three ministries. He has, on his shelf, the bound volumes of every National Day address since 2006. They are not display copies. He has marked them up with the yellow highlighter every Bhutanese civil servant of his generation carries. His marginalia track what has happened to each major announcement after it was made.

The pattern, when laid out across the twenty-year archive, is consistent.

In 2008 the address articulated the framework for the country’s transition to constitutional monarchy. The system, working steadily, delivered the first elections within months and the institutional maturity to handle peaceful transitions of power within the same parliamentary term. The 2008 announcement was, unusually, met by an already-prepared system. The 2008 lag was approximately zero — because the apparatus for democratic transition had been built over the preceding decade under the Fourth King’s explicit direction.

In 2011 the address launched the DeSuung programme. Volunteer corps, crisis response, civic mobilisation. The first batch of fifty DeSuups trained in the same year. The programme grew steadily across the decade, expanded its scope through COVID-19 deployment, reached its current fifty-six batches by 2026. The 2011 lag, measured against full operational maturity, was approximately ten years.

In 2019 the address announced the Gyalsung National Service. Compulsory one-year service for all Bhutanese youth at age eighteen, combining military training, civic education, vocational skills, and national identity formation. The Gyalsung Act passed in 2022. The first Jamtsholing Academy cohort completed in 2024. The system is now in its operational phase, with the first cohort-by-cohort cumulative effects expected to be visible by the late 2020s. The 2019 lag, to full operational capacity, will be roughly seven to ten years.

In 2020 the Royal Kashos on Education Reform and Civil Service Reform were issued on National Day. The Civil Service Reform Act passed in 2022. The Royal Civil Service Commission has been working through the implications — including the MaX system, the Bell Curve debate of 2026 chronicled in earlier chapters of this book — ever since. The Education Reform implementation is still arriving in schools through the Cambridge curriculum rollout, the textbook supply chain, and the teacher development programmes that this book has touched on. The 2020 lag, to full implementation, will be at least a decade.

In 2023 the GMC was announced. The 2023 lag, by the visible markers, is on track to be approximately the same.

In 2024 the address articulated the framework for the Population and Housing Census 2027. The 2024 lag, measured against the census itself, is approximately three years.

On 21 February 2026 the Royal address at the Jarog Khashor Chorten ground launched Project 108 — the framework for a hundred and eight institutions, initiatives, and infrastructure projects to be commissioned across the next two decades. The 2026 lag is, by the same pattern, beginning to unfold in 2026.

Tenzin has, on his shelf, the file folder labelled “Project 108 — operational implications.” The folder is, in May 2026, mostly empty. The civil-service workstreams that will populate it are being constituted now. The lag, measured from the announcement date, has begun its count.

The Royal Audit Authority’s Annual Audit Report 2024-25 Volume I records a year-over-year explosion in irregularities reported across the construction-procurement portfolio. The figure for FY 2024-25 — Nu 9,987 million in observations — is more than twice the Nu 4,002 million reported for FY 2021-22. The increase is concentrated in one mega-project: Punatsangchhu-II Hydropower Authority, where reported irregularities reach Nu 7,790 million, or seventy-eight percent of the total.

One mega-project, three quarters of the country’s annual irregularity report. The other twenty-two percent is spread across hundreds of smaller projects, agencies, and institutions.

The pattern is consistent with the broader theme of this chapter: the visible royal-vision project absorbs disproportionate institutional attention, and the second-order audit-and-compliance apparatus has not yet been built at the scale required to monitor those projects across their multi-decade construction windows.

The pattern is structural rather than personal. The Crown’s strategic vision is the country’s most valuable institutional asset. The Crown’s horizon — ten years, twenty years, forty years — is the only institutional horizon that survives electoral cycles, ministerial rotation, and bureaucratic turnover. No Prime Minister has the standing to commit the country to a Multi-Disciplinary Super-Specialty Hospital over fifteen years of construction. No Minister of Energy and Natural Resources has the standing to commit to a Gelephu Mindfulness City over forty years of build-out. The Crown does. The Crown has.

The mirror-image of that strategic asset is the operational gap. The Crown announces. The Cabinet receives the announcement. The Cabinet asks the relevant ministry to operationalise it. The ministry asks the relevant department. The department asks the relevant unit. The unit, in most cases, does not yet exist. The unit is constituted. The unit begins to staff. The unit produces its first draft framework. The framework goes to the ministry, the Cabinet, the National Assembly. The first legislation passes. The first regulatory body is constituted. The first operational cycle begins. The country’s capacity to deliver catches up to the Crown’s capacity to articulate. The catching-up takes, consistently, about a decade.

Across the decade of catching-up, multiple things happen at once. The political government changes once or twice. The minister responsible for implementation changes two or three times. The senior civil servants assigned to the workstream rotate. The international consultants contracted at the outset move on to other projects. The donors who would have funded the early phases shift their priorities. The cohort of graduates who would have staffed the operational apparatus reaches working age, often emigrates, sometimes returns. The country’s context changes. The framework that was articulated against the 2023 macroeconomic backdrop arrives in a 2033 macroeconomic backdrop.

The result is that the Crown’s most ambitious announcements arrive at the operational level a decade after they were made, into a country that has, in the meantime, changed. The system delivers what the Crown announced. It delivers it later, into a different country, by a different generation of operators, against a different set of constraints.

This is not a flaw of any individual minister, civil servant, or political party. It is the architecture of a country whose strategic vision function is concentrated in a single institution that operates on a horizon that the rest of the institutional apparatus has not yet learned to match.

Three earlier institutional cases sharpen the pattern.

The first is the Royal Education Council. Constituted in 2008 by Royal charter, mandated to operate as the long-horizon planning body for Bhutanese education — curriculum reform, teacher development pipeline, the framework that would carry the country’s schools across the next generation. It produced substantive work for a decade. By 2018, the operational logic of its mandate had been absorbed into the Ministry of Education and its successor under MoESD. The REC was wound down. The function it was created for — long-horizon strategic planning for education — continues to exist as part of MoESD’s portfolio but no longer has its own institutional carrier with a horizon longer than the ministerial cycle. The Cambridge curriculum decision of 2024 was made inside that structurally shortened horizon. The textbook delivery problem of 2026, examined in Chapter Eight, traces in part to the loss of a planning body that operated on a different time frame.

The second is the National Land Commission. Established in 1979 as the country’s permanent custodian of land records, expanded across the decades into a body that now holds title to nearly every Bhutanese parcel, the NLC has been one of modern Bhutan’s steadier institutional performers. Its strength is also its limit: it operates on the horizon of land transactions — typically a year or two for a regularisation case, sometimes longer for inheritance disputes — and not on the horizon of land-use strategy across multiple decades. The country’s land questions of the 2030s — urban densification around Thimphu and Phuentsholing, agricultural-land conversion in the southern dzongkhags, the GMC perimeter management, the long-fallow village land of the emigration-stripped eastern dzongkhags — require an institutional horizon longer than the one the NLC was structured around. The articulation of that longer horizon, when it comes, will come from the Crown. The operationalisation will follow on the same lag.

The third is the Bhutan Economic Forum for Innovative Transformation — BEFIT — launched in 2013 as a vehicle for cross-sectoral economic strategy. The forum gathered the country’s economic leadership across government, the central bank, the corporate sector, and the diaspora. It produced a series of strategy documents through the mid-2010s. By the early 2020s the cadence had slowed. The institutional energy moved to the 12th Five-Year Plan, then the 13th, then the GMC Authority. BEFIT itself, as a permanent strategic-planning body, did not crystallise. The country has, in its 13th FYP and the GMC Authority, two operational planning bodies that together cover much of what BEFIT was meant to do. What it does not yet have is a single body whose explicit mandate is to do for the Bhutanese economy what the Crown does for the Bhutanese state — articulate a horizon that survives the political and ministerial cycle.

The lesson across the three cases is not that the country failed in any of them. Each represented a serious institutional attempt. The lesson is that the long-horizon planning function, when it sits outside the Crown, has been structurally difficult to sustain across multiple political cycles. The institutions either get absorbed back into ministerial portfolios (REC), narrow to their transactional horizon (NLC), or fail to crystallise as permanent bodies (BEFIT). The Crown’s articulating function persists because the Crown’s institutional position is designed to operate above the political cycle. No other Bhutanese institution has yet been designed to operate at that horizon.

What would the second-order infrastructure to match the Crown’s horizon actually look like?

The honest answer is that no one has fully designed it. The components are, however, beginning to be visible across the country’s institutional debate.

First, a permanent strategic-planning capacity inside the Cabinet Secretariat. Most modern small states with comparable long-horizon ambitions — Singapore’s Centre for Strategic Futures, the United Arab Emirates’ Ministry of Cabinet Affairs and the Future, Finland’s Office of the Prime Minister Strategy unit — maintain a permanent body whose explicit job is to translate political-leadership horizon into operational workstreams. Bhutan has elements of this capacity scattered across the Cabinet Secretariat, the GNH Commission, and DHI’s strategy function. A single consolidated body would be the most direct institutional analogue to the Crown’s articulating function. It does not yet exist as a named institution with that mandate.

Second, a strategic-planning capability inside the civil service. Currently, the civil service operates on a one-year budget cycle and a five-year plan cycle. The longer cycles — ten, twenty, forty years — are not part of any civil servant’s formal portfolio. The Royal Civil Service Commission’s E2B 10X initiative, examined in Chapter One of this book, is a step in this direction; the Civil Service Strategic Roadmap 2025–2035 is another. The full operational shift — where a deputy secretary at MoESD or MoENR has, as part of her job description, a twenty-year horizon she is accountable for — has not been made.

Third, a parliamentary committee infrastructure pre-positioned for Royal articulations. The Crown’s announcements arrive into a parliamentary apparatus whose committees are organised around current policy areas, not anticipatory ones. The Cambridge curriculum decision of 2024 arrived in a parliamentary committee structure that had to be constituted to handle it. The same will be true for whatever the Crown articulates next. A pre-positioned strategic-planning committee with permanent drafting capacity would shorten the legislative phase of the lag.

Fourth, a parliamentary research service. Most parliaments of comparable maturity have a permanent staff body — the US Congressional Research Service, the UK House of Commons Library, India’s Parliament Library and Research Service — whose job is to produce the analytical capacity that legislators need to engage substantively with policy. The Bhutanese National Assembly Secretariat and National Council Secretariat have research functions but at modest scale. Expanding that capacity is among the cleanest investments the country could make.

Fifth, a diaspora-engagement mechanism for strategic input. The returning Bhutanese cohort — the Karma Demas, the Tashi Yangchens, the Chokis who might come back — carry institutional knowledge from systems that have already built much of the second-order infrastructure Bhutan is now contemplating. There is no formal mechanism that captures their input on long-horizon strategy. The Australian diaspora alone now exceeds the population of Trongsa Dzongkhag; the institutional knowledge in that cohort is substantial. A formal mechanism — perhaps a Diaspora Strategic Council that meets quarterly and feeds into the Cabinet Secretariat’s strategic-planning function — would unlock a resource the country has not yet learned to draw on.

Sixth, a long-horizon research and analysis capacity outside government. The Centre for Bhutan Studies and GNH Research has carried much of this load. RIM has carried some. The Royal Bhutan Police Academy of Excellence carries more than most observers credit. The country has the beginnings of a think-tank infrastructure but not the density of independent analytical capacity that would support a national debate at the horizon the Crown operates on. The think-tank Tenzin joined in 2026 is one small step. The next decade of expansion in this space will determine whether the country has, by 2035, the analytical depth its strategic ambitions require.

None of these six institutional moves is novel. Each has been pioneered by another small state operating on long horizons. Each is consistent with the Bhutanese institutional tradition — they are not foreign transplants but adaptations. Each could be initiated within the existing constitutional framework without major legislative change. What they require is the decision to make them, and the patience to build them across the multi-year horizons their establishment demands.

The decision sits inside the same institutional architecture that generated the lag in the first place. The political government that would launch a Centre for Strategic Futures has, on average, less than a five-year electoral horizon. The civil service that would staff it operates on the same five-year plan cycle. The parliamentary committee structure that would oversee it is organised for current rather than anticipatory work. The institutional logic that would, in another country, naturally generate the second-order infrastructure does not naturally generate it in Bhutan.

This is the deeper meaning of the chapter’s thesis. The Crown sees ten years ahead because the Crown is structurally positioned to. The rest of the apparatus sees one to five years ahead because the rest of the apparatus is structurally positioned to. The work of the next twenty years is to alter the structural positioning of the rest of the apparatus so it can operate, alongside the Crown, on the same horizon.

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Twenty-three customers in Bhutan consume eighty-eight percent of the electricity the country uses domestically. They pay a per-unit tariff that, fully loaded, costs them about one and nine-tenths of one US cent per kilowatt-hour. The third or fourth cheapest in the world. Only Iran, under sanctions and heavy subsidy, and parts of Ethiopia, under state pricing, charge their large industrial users less. The Icelandic aluminium smelter contracts — the global benchmark for energy-intensive industrial electricity in a renewable-rich economy — charge eighty-five percent more. American industrial customers pay four times as much on average. German industrial customers pay nine and a half times as much.

In May of 2026, the Bhutan Power Corporation proposed a tariff revision. The proposal raised the residential rate by one hundred and fifteen percent and the industrial rate by seventy-five percent. Both rates, after the revision, would still be globally cheap. But the smaller relative increase falls on the customers who already enjoy the world’s deepest legitimate industrial subsidy, and the larger relative increase falls on the country’s roughly two hundred thousand households who do not.

In every comparable cheap-electricity country — Iceland, Norway, Quebec — the cross-subsidy in the system runs the other direction. Large industrial users subsidise households through bundled grid-cost allocations. In the Bhutanese 2026 proposal, the subsidy runs uphill. The Prime Minister sent the proposal back to the regulator for an affordability review. The proposal was prepared exactly as the system above it was looking elsewhere.

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The first Bhutanese hydropower project, the 336 megawatt Chhukha plant, commissioned in 1986. Feasibility surveys began in the late 1970s. By 2026 the country has nearly fifty years of cumulative experience: site selection in some of the world’s most technically challenging Himalayan terrain, dam engineering against the geology of an active orogenic belt, tunnelling through unstable shear zones. Eight operational plants. The expertise is genuinely deep and genuinely Bhutanese.

The number of Bhutanese engineering or contracting firms that have been hired to design, build, or supervise hydropower projects abroad is, after fifty years, effectively zero.

The pattern repeats across the country’s other fields of depth. Seventeen years of measured Gross National Happiness, copied by the OECD’s Better Life Index and the United Nations World Happiness Report; no Bhutanese consultancy delivering wellbeing-framework advisory to other governments. Forty years of community-forestry programmes under a constitutional sixty-percent forest-cover mandate that produced a carbon-negative economy; no Bhutanese forestry firm operating internationally. Fifty years of the high-value-low-volume tourism model and the Sustainable Development Fee mechanism; no Bhutanese firm exporting the strategy as billable advisory. Thirty years of Sowa Rigpa, the traditional medicine system, at the Faculty of Traditional Medicine; no Bhutanese institute training foreign practitioners at meaningful scale. Four hundred years of refined Buddhist monastic governance; no exported governance-model advisory. Eighteen years since the 2008 democratic transition; no Bhutanese consultancy helping other monarchies in transition design comparable arrangements.

By contrast: Bitcoin is a seventeen-year-old industry. Sovereign-scale Bitcoin mining as a recognised category is roughly four years old. Bhutan’s sovereign Bitcoin mining operation, established in that window, has reached global frontier presence. Its leadership has working-relationship access to the principals of the global crypto industry. The same is true of the Gelephu Mindfulness City’s financial-services architecture, of the sovereign-issued gold-backed token on the Solana blockchain, of the Mindfulness City brand positioning in international policy conversations. The country has gone from non-presence to vanguard in approximately four years.

The asymmetry is this chapter’s pattern in a different dimension. Where the Crown directly mobilises, Bhutan reaches global frontier presence within years, through dedicated institutions designed from day one for international engagement. Where line ministries operate — hydropower, the happiness framework, forestry, tourism, traditional medicine, monastic governance, constitutional-transition design — Bhutan stays domestically deep and internationally absent across decades.

The mechanism is structural. A senior engineer at the Druk Green Power Corporation paid on civil-service grade has no professional reward for international engagement. No “Druk Green International” exists; the agency is built for domestic delivery only. No ministry champions hydropower exports through trade missions or export-credit facilities. Bhutan continues to import the technical-services consultants its own engineers could match. Norway, after building oil expertise domestically in the 1970s, created Equinor and DNV specifically to export it; Norwegian oil-services revenue is now larger than Norwegian oil revenue. Singapore built Surbana Jurong out of its urban planners. The Republic of Korea built KEPCO International out of its power engineers. Finland built Pöyry out of its foresters. Israel built Mekorot Development out of its water managers. Each was state-launched, with explicit international mandate from day one.

Bhutan has not built the equivalent for any of the fields it has half a century of depth in. The institutional pattern that works for the four-year-old sovereign Bitcoin operation has not been applied to the fifty-year-old hydropower programme. The same Crown-mobilised model could, if extended, package the existing domestic depth into exportable services worth, on conservative consulting benchmarks, one hundred to five hundred million US dollars annually — and produce, more importantly, the soft-power lever that the Mindfulness City’s regional positioning implicitly assumes Bhutan has but has not yet actually built.

SIDEBAR · The Crown sees ten years ahead, the system reacts ten years late

The structural pattern, distilled:

Royal articulation in 1979: Gross National Happiness (the canonically cited date, on the coronation tour, in response to a journalist’s question). Operational measurement framework: 2008. Lag: 29 years.

Royal articulation in 2001: Constitution of Bhutan. Promulgated: 2008. Lag: 7 years.

Royal articulation in 2006: Voluntary abdication. Subsequent constitutional democracy operational at full electoral maturity by: 2013 (second peaceful electoral transfer). Lag: 7 years.

Royal articulation in 2011: DeSuung. Operationally mature: 2021 (post-COVID deployment). Lag: 10 years.

Royal articulation in 2019: Gyalsung. First cohort operational: 2024. Full cohort-by-cohort effect: late 2020s. Lag: 7 to 10 years.

Royal articulation in 2020: Education Reform and Civil Service Reform Royal Kashos. Implementation underway: 2026. Full operational effect: mid-2030s. Lag: 10 to 15 years.

Royal articulation in 2023: Gelephu Mindfulness City. Operational framework arriving: 2026 onwards. Substantive delivery: 2030s and 2040s. Lag: 10 to 20 years.

Royal articulation in 2026: Project 108. Lag: in progress.

The pattern is not that the system is slow. The pattern is that the Crown’s horizon is structurally longer than any other Bhutanese institution’s horizon. The decade of lag is the time it takes the rest of the apparatus to extend its planning horizon to match.

Tenzin, the civil servant with the marked-up royal-address volumes, took voluntary early-retirement in March 2026. He was forty-four. He had twenty-two years of service. He could have served twenty more. He took the early-retirement option because, after twenty-two years inside the catching-up apparatus, he wanted to spend the next twenty years inside the articulating apparatus. He has joined a small think tank in Thimphu that consults on strategy for the GMC Authority. His mark-up of the royal-address archive is part of the institutional knowledge he brought with him.

Karma Dema, the geology graduate from Chapter Seven, did her one-year fellowship at the Indian School of Mines and returned to Bhutan in 2024. She joined the Department of Geology and Mines. She is now thirty. Her work, since returning, has been to populate the long-promised national geological-mineral inventory — the map that the country has never made, which Chapter Seven described. The Royal directive to complete the inventory was articulated in 2018. The DGM’s capacity to actually deliver the inventory is, in 2026, being built around her cohort. The lag, in her case, was approximately seven years. The full inventory will arrive in 2027 or 2028.

Tashi Yangchen, the GMC architect from Chapter Eight, is now twenty-eight. She has been at the GMC Authority for three years. Her job, in her own description, is to translate the December 2023 announcement into the hundred and twenty-thousand individual operational decisions that, in aggregate, constitute the city. The lag, in her case, is the lag of her own career. She expects to be still doing this work at fifty.

The Crown will, in the meantime, articulate the next horizon. Probably within a year. Possibly within months. The pattern says that the next announcement will be operationalised by the cohort of Bhutanese graduates who are, in May 2026, finishing their secondary education. They are about to enter Gyalsung. They will encounter, in their training, the operational vocabulary of the previous decade of Royal articulations: GNH, DeSuung, the Constitution, the 2007 Treaty, the 2008 Adoption, the GMC, Project 108. They will not yet encounter the vocabulary of the articulation that will define their own working lives, because that articulation has not yet been made.

This is the function the Crown serves. This is the function the rest of the institutional apparatus does not yet serve at the same horizon.

The work of the next twenty years — to return to this book’s thesis — is to build the second-order capacity inside the rest of the apparatus to operate at the horizon the Crown already operates at. Not to replace the Crown’s function. To match it. To shorten the decade of catching-up to something closer to a year of catching-up. To reduce the lag.

The country has the institutions. The country has the talent. The country has the reserves. The country has, increasingly, the cohort of returning Bhutanese — Karma Dema, Tashi Yangchen, Choki the paediatrician considering whether to return again, Tenzin in his second career — who have seen, abroad, how systems with shorter institutional horizons operate. The cohort knows what the second-order infrastructure looks like. The country has not yet decided to build it.

This book has argued, across ten chapters, that the work of building it is the work of the next twenty years. The first-order achievements of the preceding sixty years are the foundation. The second-order infrastructure is the upper structure that turns the foundation into the country the foundation made possible.

The Crown has articulated. The Crown will articulate again. The question is whether the rest of the apparatus, in the next twenty years, will learn to articulate alongside.

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