LOCAL government is being talked about as one of the possible ‘solutions’ to the heightened political and economic turbulence in the country. LG is attractive in theory, promising better service delivery with greater accountability as its two principal benefits. It works well in many places but not in all. We need to assess what to expect of it in our context.

Two facts about LG in Pakistan are well established: it has been enthusiastically promoted by dictators and largely shunned by politicians, perhaps because the former need new and dependent constituencies to support their rule while the latter do not wish to dilute their powers. The like or dislike of LG is driven by a political calculus, not by a concern for better governance. Add to that the existence of a parallel colonial-style bureaucracy whose contempt for LG matches the hostility of politicians. In such a scenario, it is not simple to embed LG such that it delivers on its potential.

In the absence of political ownership, the recourse to enforcing LG through court mandates is not promising; we know how many court mandates have been stymied or subverted because of political non-compliance. There is, however, another issue to consider. Can democracy be deepened in a non-democratic way? If citizens are not clamouring for LG, would it work or what might it morph into instead?

LG, the way we are seeing it, is the devolution of electoral representation to the lowest level, the end-point of the continuum from top to bottom. Examining the experiences at intermediate levels might yield some useful insights. Recall that a mass demand for electoral representation was not part of the Indian independence movement. Pratap Bhanu Mehta characterised independence as “simply the outcome of a negotiation between India’s elites on the one hand, and colonial powers on the other.”

If citizens are not clamouring for LG, would it work or what might it morph into instead?

Lack of popular demand for representative governance elicited on the eve of independence a prediction, falsely attributed to Churchill, that “power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues and freebooters.” Today, over a third of elected representatives in India are charged with criminal offences, a fifth with crimes of a serious nature. Some states like UP have more than half their MLAs in the first category, the number increasing 15 per cent between the 2017 and 2022 elections. Could LG without popular demand meet the same fate at a lower tier in Pakistan?

LG works well in Europe but for us the better comparators are India, where it received constitutional cover in 1992, and Bangladesh, where it has been introduced and suspended a number of times since 1982. Naresh Saxena, a highly regarded Indian civil servant, concluded that “it was an error to think that [LGs] would emerge as caring institutions in an environment of rent-seeking politics and unresponsive and inefficient bureaucracy” and that to believe otherwise is “neither good theory nor does it have any empirical validity”. On Bangladesh, academic Pranab Panday wrote that LG “has not lived up to the promises and expectations” and that “the extensive interference of politicians and bureaucrats has limited considerably the capacity of [LG] to operate effectively.”

There is no escaping the need to further explore the determinants of relative effectiveness of governance. Despite the overall conclusion about India, there is general agreement that LG works relatively better in Kerala. Many claim that Swat under the wali was better governed than it has been since. Even without effective LG, a self-governing Bangladesh’s welfare indicators have outpaced Pakistan’s. Malaysia retained the hereditary sultans while the executive head of government was an elected prime minister. The managed transition has yielded better governance, political stability and economic development.

This suggests the need for a nuanced approach. Perhaps a generic LG cannot be imposed from above but has to be consonant with local realities. My research supports this inference. I surveyed water supply systems in fairly large villages in Punjab at a time when community management was in the news based on the success of the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme in the Northern Areas. I asked village residents if they would prefer managing the water system themselves. They answered negatively, based on a facet of their lived reality to which insufficient attention is paid in design recommendations. While well aware that the service provided by the government department was sub-par, they did not wish something as vital as water to become hostage to village politics divided sharply along biradari lines.

One takeaway from this is that electoral politics is a modern innovation (universal adult franchise is not even 100 years old in some ‘mature’ democracies) premised on the relative homogeneity of population and the primacy of the individual. While it works well in Europe, it fits uneasily in diverse societies rooted in the politics of identity and marshalled into vote-banks. All the more so when elections are based on the first-past-the-post system which constricts the representation of marginalised groups. (Proportional representation was introduced in 2019 but revoked in 2021.) In such situations, democracy slides very easily into majoritarianism.

If this is true, we might find that even within Pakistan LG would work better in GB than in Punjab. In the latter, however, it could actually be harmful at the local level where the marginalised are easily identifiable and their numbers not large enough to offer protection. Given all the caveats, we might do better to first deepen democracy at the intermediate levels where there is at least a little, though not much, more safety in numbers. Thus, it might make sense to lay more stress on the demand for smaller provinces and province-level status for major metropoles.

There is no arguing that the potential benefits of LG are huge but we need to reflect more on appropriate design and avoid transplants that the body politic is likely to reject. We might also benefit from deepening democracy in steps, taking care first of the dysfunctional intermediate levels via proportional representation before plunging all the way down.

The writer is a co-author of the 2000 World Development Report, Entering the 21st Century: Globalisation, Localisation and Urbanisation.

Published in Dawn, February 13th, 2023