The 18th Amendment was a monumental breakthrough in Pakistan’s political arena. The amendment inserted Article 140-A into the constitution, mandating the establishment of local governments and paving the way for improved governance and democracy throughout the nation.
However, devolution to LGs has been slow, with no local government election held for almost four years after the promulgation. When elections did eventually come to Punjab and Sindh, they came not from political will but by order of the Supreme Court. The fact that a constitutional command had to be enforced by judicial proceedings says everything about how Pakistan’s governing elite receives the idea of sharing power.
The pattern has persisted ever since. In 2021, when Punjab dissolved its local bodies without replacement, the Supreme Court took notice, observing that the province had been without elected local governments for 21 months, and described it as a straightforward violation of Article 140-A. Thus, a legal framework exists that is unambiguous and recognised by the courts. However, the governments are reluctant to enforce it.
Local governments are tasked with maintaining order and improving community life, a duty that the federal and provincial governments cannot effectively manage, as they cannot address thousands of local issues simultaneously. This is evident in Pakistan, where certain major cities are developed, while the rest are underdeveloped. Local governments act as a means of decentralising power, widening the tax base, and enabling speedy decision-making, whereas decisions made by provincial governments are delayed by bureaucracy and centralisation.
Pakistan has long been trapped in a vicious cycle of inflation and rising cost of living. Direct tax collection remains chronically low due to widespread evasion, forcing the state to rely heavily on indirect taxation, meaning citizens pay a significant premium on everyday commodities. The petroleum levy further intensifies the burden on an already squeezed public.
The question that arises is: where does this money go? The answer is simple: when decision-making is centralised and made far from the people, money is lost to corruption and misallocation. A provincial minister allocating development funds for a district he has never visited has no stake in whether the project is completed. The funds move through layers of bureaucracy, procurement committees and contractors with connections – and somewhere along the way, they vanish.
At the heart of that system sits Pakistan’s civil bureaucracy, an institution inherited from a colonial administration whose express purpose was extraction, not service, and which has changed remarkably little since. Corruption in it is structural, normalised, and in many quarters, simply expected.
What makes this worse is the near-total absence of accountability. Bureaucrats are appointed through competitive examinations, not elections, owing nothing to the people they govern. Their only line of accountability runs upward, to the minister they serve, who is himself overburdened, politically preoccupied and unlikely to concern himself with a stalled development project in an obscure district that generates no headlines and wins no votes.
Such practices are disrupted by the local governments. Decentralisation moves government closer to the people, broadens the tax base and allows alternative service delivery in the social services sector. Furthermore, unlike bureaucrats, local government representatives are elected, owe their positions to their constituents, and can be voted out if they fail to deliver. Here, proximity is accountability, and accountability is precisely what Pakistan’s governance has lacked for decades. When power is bought close to the people, the room for plunder shrinks and the chances of actual delivery grow.
The evidence for this exists in Pakistan’s own history. Under the city district government of Karachi during the 2000s, mayors wielded direct control over funds to transform the city. Mayor Mustafa Kamal earned international recognition for his improvements to the city. When the PPP government in Sindh subsequently dismantled that structure, the result was a mayor who, by his own public admission, had no power. The office remained; the authority was gone, and Karachi’s visible deterioration since then is not incidental. It is the predictable consequence of stripping local government of the tools it needs to govern.
Similar practices were adopted by Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, when rapid urbanisation outpaced the central government’s capacity to manage sanitation, housing, water supply, and public health. This led to the Municipal Revolution, in which local governing bodies were empowered to enter into what was effectively a service delivery contract with their populations. The municipal governments have transformed some of England’s most neglected industrial cities into functioning, livable urban centres within decades. The model worked because accountability was local, visible, and direct.
The US took this principle further and embedded it into its political DNA. The American town and its citizens have a relationship that is almost constitutional in character: the town meeting, the elected local board and the directly accountable mayor. An American citizen does not think of government as an abstraction that exists somewhere in Washington; s/he thinks of it as the entity responsible for her/his street, school, water. That relationship creates both expectation and accountability.
Thus, a local government that understands its community can design revenue and expenditure in a way that a distant authority never can. It knows which areas need investment, which populations are most vulnerable, and how development spending can be targeted to produce the greatest impact, leading to improved service delivery, and it rebuilds the broken contract between the citizen and the state.
Here, a serious objection must be confronted. There are arguments that local governments do not reduce corruption; they merely relocate it, and that local elites and feudal networks will simply capture local bodies and reproduce the same patronage politics at a smaller scale. However, it is worth noting that local corruption has one property that provincial corruption structurally lacks: visibility. When a union council chairman pockets funds meant for a local drain, the people who needed that drain know it. They can identify the person responsible and hold them accountable at the next election, whereas centralised corruption is diffuse, opaque and shielded by layers of bureaucratic distance.
Another threat to Pakistan is the lack of democracy, with the country being ranked amongst the top 10 worst performers by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2024. It has been 15 years since the last military dictator left power, and the nation has seen multiple general elections where governments have loudly proclaimed their democratic credentials. Yet, no prime minister has completed their term in office, and the 2024 general elections speak volumes about the state of democracy. Democracy in Pakistan has largely meant the transfer of authority from one elite to another. If democracy does not reach every galli, muhalla, every village, every union council, then the public has been handed a ballot and nothing else.
Politicians speak endlessly about their ‘mandate’ from the people, yet they overlook the very mechanism aimed at strengthening democratic institutions, and have, in fact, been the ones to dismantle or hollow out those very institutions. A member of the national or provincial assembly need not remain the sole channel between the state and his constituents. The MNA or MPA needs those constituents to prosper and develop; this is where local governments step in. An empowered local government that fixes the roads and builds the schools does not diminish them. The politician is not surrendering their power but converting it into something more durable. A politician who delivers at every level is one the public trusts and defends.
A state that cannot deliver to its citizens has failed its most basic function. Pakistan collects taxes, passes constitutional amendments, yet the school remains unbuilt, the manholes remain uncovered and the citizen remains a stranger to the government that claims to represent him. This is the consequence of deliberately keeping power concentrated and accountability distant.
The solution does not require a new amendment or another IMF programmw. It requires implementation of what already exists: Article 140-A. Until a person in rural areas or a working-class neighbourhood can point to an elected representative responsible for the lack of progress, and hold them accountable, Pakistan will continue to extract from its people without serving them, and to hold elections without achieving democracy. Devolution is the solution. It always has been.
The writer is a lawyer.
