Pakistan has been experimenting with governance models and structures for seventy-nine years. Few, if any, have produced the results promised at the time. We have created institutions and abolished them, merged administrative units and divided them, centralised authority and decentralised it. Each experiment arrived with a new vocabulary and an old promise: better governance. The latest experiment, improving governance by creating new provinces, is now being debated in every corner of the country: in the streets, in offices, and in the assemblies. But can it bring real change? Experience suggests otherwise.
Look at the Pakistan Cricket Board. After heavy defeats against England, seven players were dropped from the Test squad and seven brought in. Whether every player deserved to stay is a separate question. What matters here is the governing instinct the episode represents.
This was not one bad week. Mohsin Naqvi has chaired the board since February 2024, while also serving as federal interior minister and, since 2025, as president of the Asian Cricket Council. In those two and a half years the results have not turned. In early 2025 Pakistan hosted the Champions Trophy, its first global tournament on home soil in twenty-nine years, and went out in the group stage without winning a single match. It was the third major ICC tournament in a row that Pakistan failed to get past the first round. At the T20 World Cup last February, the team again went out early. Through all of it, captains and coaches have been changed and changed again, each time in the name of a fresh start, and each time the same problems returned.
A bad result produces a crisis. A crisis produces an order. The order produces a new team. And those executing the order are expected to produce a different outcome. The more difficult question is left for another day: why did the institution produce the outcome in the first place?
The contradiction becomes difficult to ignore when the person who chairs the PCB is also the federal interior minister. On 30 July, Mohsin Naqvi told a summit in Islamabad that Pakistan's governance system had collapsed, and argued that new provinces and administrative units were necessary to fix the country's problems. This is not an argument about one individual. It is an argument about a governing instinct. When an institution fails, do we first examine how authority is being exercised inside it, or do we reach for another structure?
Pakistan has reached for structure before. In 1955, the state created One Unit, merging the western provinces and territories into a single province of West Pakistan. It was presented as an answer to administrative and political problems, but it also served a larger purpose: creating parity between West and East Pakistan despite the population majority of the East.
The experiment lasted fifteen years. It did not produce the cohesion its architects expected. Instead, it generated resistance among the provinces whose identities and autonomy had been absorbed into the new arrangement. In 1970, One Unit was abolished and the previous structure restored. Today the proposal is the mirror image. Then, we merged provinces; now, we want to divide them. The direction has changed. The instinct has not. We still believe that if the structure is wrong, changing the structure will solve the problem.
But governance is not the map. A province is a boundary; it is not automatically an institution. A new secretariat does not create better governance. A new assembly does not create political ownership. A new chief minister does not create institutional capacity. A new administrative unit does not create trust between citizens and the state. Those things have to be built, and they are built after the notification.
Changing the eleven is easy. Changing the board is harder. Changing the culture that keeps producing the same institutional behaviour is harder still.
That is the part of governance Pakistan repeatedly underestimates. We are remarkably good at the beginning of reform. We announce it, notify it, launch it. We hold a ceremony, create a committee, produce an implementation matrix. Then the real work begins. It begins where policy meets institutions, where institutions meet people, where interests collide, where bureaucracies resist, where political ownership is tested, and where somebody has to bring together people who do not report to one another. That is leadership.
For over two decades I have worked in exactly this space, on programmes where the people who decided whether reform succeeded, the officials, the communities, the partners, did not answer to me. You cannot order such people to deliver. You can only build enough shared ownership that they choose to.
This is the distinction our implementation problem turns on. Authority comes from office, law, budget and notification. Leadership begins where those instruments stop working. Daniel Goleman's insight holds well beyond the boardroom. The best leaders change style with the situation instead of defaulting to command. Command suits a crisis, but trust, participation and ownership are what carry a reform. Pakistan reaches for command where it needs ownership. We notify when we need cooperation, convene when we need trust, and then ask why nothing moved.
And the one thing that cannot be commanded at all is cohesion. Here Joseph Nye's distinction is the useful one. Hard power brings people into the room. Soft power, meaning credibility, relationships and shared purpose, decides what they do once they are inside. A government can legislate a province into existence. It cannot legislate belonging. Consultation without influence is theatre, and a boundary without ownership is only a line.
This is why the debate over new provinces has to go beyond how many provinces Pakistan should have. There may be legitimate arguments for them: administrative access, population size, distance from capitals, service delivery, political representation. But a new province cannot be sold as a substitute for institutional reform. If the same culture of centralisation, political interference, weak accountability and limited ownership is reproduced inside the new provinces, we will simply build more structures around the same problems. New maps, new secretariats, new political offices, and old behaviours.
So perhaps Pakistan needs to ask different questions. Not how many provinces we should have, but what kind of institutions those provinces will contain. Not who has authority, but how authority becomes ownership. Not what new structure to create, but why the structures we already have are failing to deliver.
And perhaps the first test should be smaller than constitutional restructuring. Take one institution and make it genuinely autonomous. Let its leadership lead, its professionals exercise judgment, its stakeholders participate, its performance be measured, and its failures produce learning rather than another reactive purge. A concrete place to start: a serving federal minister should not also chair an autonomous national institution. That single rule would cost nothing, and prove more than any new province.
The Cricket Board is a useful test case because cricket makes the problem visible. Changing the eleven is easy. Changing the board is harder. Changing the culture that keeps producing the same institutional behavior is harder still. The same is true of the state. We can merge provinces or divide them, create committees or abolish them, notify reforms or announce new ones. But unless the way we exercise power changes, the structure will keep reproducing the behavior. Pakistan does not have a shortage of policies. It has a shortage of implementation leadership. We have spent seventy-nine years changing structures. Perhaps it is time to change what happens after the notification.
Because the real test of governance is not whether the state can make people obey. It is whether the state can build institutions that people trust, participate in and take ownership of. A province can be created through a constitutional amendment, an institution through an Act, a committee through a notification. But trust cannot be notified. Ownership cannot be ordered. Cohesion cannot be legislated into existence. It has to be built. And before we redraw the map, perhaps we should prove that we can do something harder, build an institution we do not have to capture in order to make it work.