Once again, citizens are bearing the brunt of a governance vacuum at the local level. When municipal systems fail, civic regulation collapses and basic services grind to a halt, the problem is rarely a lack of laws or policies. It is the absence of empowered, elected local governments. Successive governments have refused to take the third tier of governance seriously. Article 140-A of the constitution obliges provinces to establish local governments with political, administrative and financial authority. This was intended to bring power closer to the people and ensure that decisions affecting daily life were made by representatives rooted in the community. Yet, more than a decade after the 18th Amendment, this promise remains largely unfulfilled. Provinces have resisted meaningful devolution, disrupted tenures, altered structures and withheld financial powers. The result is a system that exists on paper but is hollow in practice. The situation in Islamabad is a particularly stark illustration of this dysfunction. The federal capital went more than four years without elected local representatives, caught in bureaucratic disputes and legal wrangling over administrative arrangements. Even now, the local bodies elections to be held next month are said to be uncertain.
The consequences are visible everywhere. Cities expand without planning. Drainage and sanitation systems are neglected until they collapse. In functioning systems, these matters are handled quietly and efficiently by local authorities. In Pakistan, they become national issues because there is no credible local tier to manage them. Local governments are the most immediate expression of representative rule. They are where citizens first encounter the state, not as an abstraction but as a service provider. When this tier is missing or weakened, the distance between the citizen and the state grows. People are forced to seek help from provincial secretariats or political patrons for matters that should be resolved at the neighbourhood level. Provincial governments often justify their reluctance to devolve power by citing concerns about capacity, efficiency or uniformity. These arguments do not withstand scrutiny. Capacity is built through authority, and uniformity imposed from above cannot substitute for responsiveness on the ground.
Financial autonomy is the most critical missing piece. Without the power to levy local taxes and control spending, local governments cannot function. They become dependent on provincial grants, vulnerable to political pressure and unable to plan. A local council that cannot decide how to spend its own money is not a government in any meaningful sense. And the damage extends beyond service delivery. Weak local governance distorts development priorities. It favours large, visible projects over everyday needs and encourages a culture of dependency rather than participation. There is also a fiscal dimension. When the tier closest to the people is starved of resources and authority, the state relies more heavily on external assistance and emergency funding. Problems that could be resolved cheaply and early become expensive and urgent. The country lurches from crisis to crisis, borrowing to patch holes that should never have opened. If Pakistan is serious about governance reform, urban management and democratic credibility, it must stop treating local governments as expendable.
