Pakistan is once again debating how it should govern itself below the federal level. Some favour new provinces. Others want smaller administrative units. Still others argue the real answer is stronger local government.
What looks like one argument about administrative boundaries is actually at least three: about efficiency, identity and power. None of these can be maximised at the expense of the others, and none can safely be ignored. The task is to construct an acceptable, sustainable accommodation among all three.
Pakistan’s provinces have become exceptionally large; Punjab alone has the population of a substantial country. Yet smaller is not automatically better: a unit can be too large to remain accessible or too small to carry administrative capacity and political weight. The real question is not how small government can be made, but at what scale particular responsibilities are best performed.
This points toward decentralisation, but decentralisation need not mean dismantling the provinces. Pakistan’s provinces carry deep historical, linguistic and political meaning; treating them as mere administrative inconvenience risks creating political problems while solving administrative ones. Nor does the constitution require a choice between provinces and local government: Article 140A already requires every province to devolve political, administrative and financial authority to elected local government. The province is already there; local government is already constitutionally recognised. The real problem is how to build a more effective relationship between them.
Administrative reform is often discussed as though political interests were unfortunate complications that a sufficiently clever technical fix would dissolve. They will not. Every meaningful restructuring redistributes authority; someone above loses discretion when functions move down; provincial government confronts a more substantial actor below it when local government grows stronger.
These are not accidental side-effects of reform. They are part of it. Power must be treated explicitly as a third variable alongside Efficiency and Identity – not to legitimise every vested interest, but to recognise that deciding who exercises authority, and how much, is itself the legitimate business of politics.
This is the essay’s central proposition: power removed from a legitimate political stakeholder in one domain may need to be compensated through authority, representation or opportunity in another. This is not an accounting formula – political power cannot be measured and traded unit for unit – but a principle of institutional sustainability. A reform that creates powerful groups with strong incentives to abolish it survives only as long as the political circumstances that produced it remain unchanged.
Pakistan’s recurring experience with local government fits this pattern. Strong local government has been introduced periodically, yet its continuity has stayed contested – arguably because provincial political leadership experienced decentralisation as authority moving away from the province, without a political settlement giving the provincial political class a sufficient stake of its own. The lesson is not that local government must stay weak, but that it needs a more sustainable political bargain.
A second mechanism, beyond compensation, is enlargement. Institutional redesign need not merely divide a fixed quantity of power; it can create new political space altogether. A new representative institution creates a new arena of political activity; stronger local government enlarges the arena available to community leadership.
Putting this together: the existing provinces are retained. Constitutionally recognised local government is strengthened. Between them, each province could contain a small number – perhaps 3-6 – of sub-provinces: not new provinces of the federation, but an executive tier handling functions too large for a district yet unnecessary to concentrate at the provincial capital.
This executive bridge needs a representative counterpart: a provincial senate. The provincial assembly would represent population; the Senate would represent sub-provincial territories. Crucially, senators would be elected not by the assembly (which would simply reproduce the same political structure) nor by direct popular vote (creating yet another competing mandate), but by an electoral college drawn from the elected leadership of local governments within each sub-province.
The democratic chain becomes: citizens to local governments to sub-provincial electoral college to provincial senate. Local government would thereby gain something it presently lacks – an institutionalised route into the provincial legislature itself, rather than merely negotiating upward from outside it.
Efficiency asks whether an arrangement can work. Identity asks whether it has legitimacy enough to be accepted. Power asks whether the actors needed to operate it have sufficient reason to sustain it. No durable restructuring is likely to emerge from maximising any one of these in isolation. The objective should be a settlement in which all three are acknowledged, none is absolute, and each is accommodated enough to make the whole both workable and worth sustaining.
The writer is the founder and chairperson of Gallup Pakistan.
