Initiating Devolution For Service Delivery In Pakistan

Few would oppose a devolution reform that truly empowers the grassroots level and improves service delivery for the poor. This book demonstrates that the key to such devolution in rural Pakistanis is diffusing power via land reforms so that the poor are empowered and capable of ensuring that the service delivery is not hijacked and actually serves them.

This paper studies the relationship between devolution, accountability, and service delivery in Pakistan. It examines the degree of accessibility of local policy-makers and the level of competition in local elections, the expenditure patterns of local governments to gauge their sector priorities, and the extent to which local governments are focused on patronage or the provision of targeted benefits to a few as opposed to providing public goods. The main findings of the paper are three-fold. First, the accessibility of policy-makers to citizens in Pakistan is unequivocally greater after devolution, and local government elections are, with some notable exceptions, as competitive as national and provincial elections. Second, local government sector priorities are heavily tilted toward the provision of physical infrastructure - specifically, roads, water and sanitation, and rural electrification - at the expense of education and health. Third, this sector prioritization is in part a dutiful response to the relatively greater citizen demands for physical infrastructure; in part a reflection of the local government electoral structure that gives primacy to village and neighborhood-specific issues, and in part a reaction to provincial initiatives in education and health that have taken the political space away from local governments in the social sectors, thereby encouraging them to focus more toward physical infrastructure.

The recently introduced devolution is a major and significant change in the way the government system has been set-up in Pakistan. This new system has been praised as a major new development and has also drawn adverse comments from some quarters. A number of scholars and research scientists have explored the issues of devolution and governance in Pakistan in the essays that make up this book. It brings together a rich and diversified multiplicity of views. The authors include faculty members from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and other prestigious institutions in Pakistan and other countries, as well as government functionaries and scholars dealing with the issues of governance.

Politics of Socio-Spatial Transformation in Pakistan analyses the relationship between socio-spatial transformation, styles of leadership and nature of constituents in Pakistan. It examines the way social change influences politics and leadership in its most populated province. Offering a unique viewpoint to study the relationship between politics and social change by examining the nature of relationship between leaders and their constituents, the author introduces the concept of Gradients of Engagements. The book describes the way values of engagement (Talluq) and styles of leadership mediate engagements among politicians, citizens and state bureaucracy in villages and small towns of Pakistani Punjab. Starting with the mapping of socio-economic and spatio-demographic non-metropolitan locales, the book illustrates the centrality of the processes of "rurbanization" and "governmentalization". It points out how political leaders mediate these processes, personal and public demands of their constituents’ invoking claims or representativeness and public service. The author breaks engagements between leaders and constituents into four gradients of representation (elections), public service delivery (development), everyday problem-solving (governance) and collective action, thus providing a contextualized and grounded comprehension of the process democratization and its substantive and performative aspects. In addition to providing a historical sketch of economic development, evolution of social organization and development of political institutions in Punjab, the book includes an ethnography of political elites and study of everyday political engagements to show how the styles of leadership mediates the process of institutional development and public service delivery in "rurban" Punjab. A novel contribution to the study of political processes such as state formation, collective action, representation, and citizenship in a comparative manner embedded in space and informed by cultural meanings, the book will be of interest to researchers studying South Asian, Pakistan and Punjab/Sikh studies, Development Studies and Urban Studies.

For developing countries, decentralising power from central government to local authorities holds the promise of deepening democracy, empowering citizens, improving public services and boosting economic growth. But the evidence on when and how decentralisation can bring these benefits has been mixed. Under the wrong conditions, decentralised power can be captured by unrepresentative elites or undermined by corruption and the clientelistic distribution of public resources. The picture is complex, and we still do not understand enough about what factors can contribute to creating better local government, and to what effect. Decentralised Governance brings together a new generation of political economy studies that explore these questions analytically, blending theoretical insights with empirical innovation. Individual chapters provide fresh evidence from around the world, including broad cross-country data as well as detailed studies of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Ghana, Kenya and Colombia. They investigate the pros and cons of decentralisation in both democratic and autocratic regimes, and the effects of critical factors such as advances in technology, citizen-based data systems, political entrepreneurship in ethnically diverse societies, and reforms aimed at improving transparency and monitoring. This wide-ranging volume examines the conditions under which devolving power can intensify democratic competition, boost transparency, and improve local governance, providing examples of good and bad practice in both. It is essential reading for researchers investigating decentralised governance, development and democratisation, and for policymakers and practitioners drawing lessons for future reforms.

Cities are now home to 55% of the world’s population, and that number is rising. Urban populations across the world will continue to grow, including in megacities with populations over ten million. In 2016 there were 31 megacities globally, according to the United Nations’ World Cities Report, with 24 of those cities located in the Global South. That number is expected to rise to 41 by 2030, with all ten new megacities in the Global South where the processes of urbanization are intrinsically distinct from those in the Global North. The Routledge Handbook of Planning Megacities in the Global South provides rigorous comparative analyses, discussing the challenges, processes, best practices, and initiatives of urbanization in Middle America, South America, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. This book is indispensable reading for students and scholars of urban planning, and its significance as a resource will only continue to grow as urbanization reshapes the global population.

The Changing Dynamics of Civil Military Relations in Pakistan offers a unique insiders’ perspective on the political climate in the country, presenting the challenges established in boundaries of interaction between the state and its military. This book argues that the prospects of another military coup in Pakistan are minimal because of the military extending its presence in the civil arenas and thus discovering new avenues of concretising its hegemony. Based on primary data sources in the form of interviews with senior military personnel, civil bureaucrats and other relevant technocrats and using military and government publications to verify their claims, the author discusses the military’s previous takeovers and future plans from a defense point of view. The book uncovers how the military has created a space and rationale for itself in non-defense sectors. Providing a first-hand account of why and how the military extends itself beyond proscribed fields of responsibility and their expected outcomes, the book also provides a theoretical context to the military’s hegemonic status using literature on civil military relations in general and Pakistan in particular. The book uses Pakistan as a case study to show how civil military imbalances in the world over can be re-evaluated. It will be of interest to researchers studying political science, public policy, peace and security studies, governance and institutions, law and South Asian Studies.

This book focuses on the retrogressive agrarian interventions by the Pakistani military in rural Punjab and explores the social resentment and resistance it triggered, potentially undermining the consensus on a security state in Pakistan. Set against the overbearing and socially unjust role of the military in Pakistan’s economy, this book documents a breakdown in the accepted function of the military beyond its constitutionally mandated role of defence. Accompanying earlier work on military involvement in industry, commerce, finance and real estate, the authors’ research contributes to a wider understanding of military intervention, revealing its hand in various sectors of the economy and, consequently, its gains in power and economic autonomy.