ocal governments are not merely a matter of intitutional empowerment. Their purpose is to build thriving societies by empowering people and communities through a reconfiguration of power away from politicians operating on a provincial or national level.

Local governments are nurseries for political leadership. Effective local governments can enhance the overall socio-political vibrancy. Grassroots leaders can contribute new ideas for solving problems faced by their people.

The problem of exclusionary politics is not recent. Power has remained concentrated in a few hands under authoritarian as well as nominally representative governments. Elite capture has been pervasive in the so-called democratics regimes as well.

An analysis of land control data and its link to exercise of state power power provides a useful lens. The effective monoply of rural landlords, industrialists and developers often leaves the citizens aloof and alienated. This is the chief constraint on the institutionalisation of local governments in Pakistan and the meaningful development that can follow it. Hassan Javid aptly points out the irony in his chapter, Elections, Bureaucracy and the Law: The Reproduction of Landed Power in Post-colonial Punjab in the book, State and Nation-building in Pakistan: Beyond Islam and Security. The book highlights how elite politics is reproduced despite the potential for a much more participatory mode of politics. It builds a strong case for local governments and highlights the lack of will at the higher ends of the political hierarchy to promote it.

It is important not to be bogged down in a discussion of examples from our history. Instead, there is a need to pay attention to the lessons and insights these afford us.

The oligarchical hijacking of state institutions by traditional landoners is buttressed by a system of patronage and bargain that implies a constitutive relationship that serves the interest of all parties in the power nexus mentioned above. A local government system, therefore, is a direct threat to this hegemony and its alliance with the state, as a representative body disperses power and influence. The ability to resolve issues through an administrative body realigns citizens away from local patrons and towards a representative administration, consequently eliminating opportunities for exploitation.

A local government system is a direct threat to hegemony and its alliance with the state. A representative disperses power and influence.

Local governments are essentially a mechanism of state infrastructure created to address the citizens’ most immediate concerns. Their effectiveness is guaranteed by their close proximity to the people. This means, that local administrators have the most resonant ability to influence people’s lives. This makes them the best vehicle for effective service delivery. In the absence of local governors, local patrons provide a service alternative. They dispense as patronage what is an inerent right of the people and should be the mandate of local governments. In exchange for the ‘favours,’ they demnd loyalty.

The matter of local governments is highly politicised in our country. Absence of effective local governments results in personlisation of service delivery through nepotism and clientelism. The local patrons thus amass social power, pomp and authority. This represents a major violation of the social contract. It is significant that despite developing several models of local governments on paper we have been unable to create a stable, functioning local governance system. What we have, instead, is a convoluted system of regulatory ‘authorities’ or outsourced ‘tenders’ that by-pass local channels and engage only with the powerbrokers on top.

This is reflected in Pakistan’s performance on the 2022 Bertelsmann Transformation Index ranking. On the governance index, we are ranked 111 out of 137.

Recently, we have added another stakeholder in this dynamic: the foreign donors. The main issue with this arrangement is that the gap between the people and the problem solvers gets wider. In all iterations of foreign funded projects for the uplift of local communities, the local voice is almost missing, from problem identification to creating interventions and monitoring the performance. Simply put, the itended beneficiaries of these interventions have nearly no say. This, in itself, is a big problem.

Locally elected officials can develop an association with the people an outsider may not be able to build. Local representatives can make people’s voices heard. They can channelise scarce resources to optimum use and reduce waste. Once these institutions mature, we can have self-sustaining local governments. These can then generate their own funds and independently address citizens’ concerns.

The local governments are a much needed structural arrangement with many benefits. They are dynamic institutions, a manifestation of democracy and breeders thereof. They reinforce democracy as social capital. Local governments can help achieve a much-needed level of administrative maturity and efficiency through social harmonisation by integrating principals (citizens) in the decision-making process and allowing for greater equity, representativess and prosperity.

The writer is affiliated with the Centre for Governance and Policy at Information Technology University, Lahore