Pakistan is home to around 250 million people, growing at an annual rate of roughly 2.5%. By mid-century, as some estimates suggest, this figure will surge past 350 million. Yet, as the population expands drastically, the country remains trapped in a daunting governance crisis. A significant portion of the population, especially in rural peripheries, continues to endure substandard public goods, particularly in health and education. Even more alarming, however, is that these communities are denied a crucial right: the agency to shape, through their empowered local representatives, the quality of the services they receive.
In the case of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, local representatives have long been excluded from service delivery due to non-functional local governments. Since their last tenure ended in 2021, no local body elections have been held. The Election Commission of Pakistan has recently indicated plans to conduct local elections in Punjab and across 23 districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It has further blamed provincial governments for the repeated delays, arguing that frequent amendments to local government laws, specifically during and immediately after delimitation processes, have halted the polls.
This pressing issue was also highlighted in a recent report released by the World Bank evaluating the significance of fiscal federalism in Pakistan, in the aftermath of the 18th Amendment. The report emphasized a crucial concept in local governance: subsidiarity – the idea that decisions of local importance should always be made at the level closest to those directly impacted by them. It specifically noted that to ensure thorough fiscal decentralization, functional local governments are essential so that federal transfers to the provinces can flow downward to the local level. Although the report received mixed reviews within the country, where some scholars criticized it as an intrusion into what are considered Pakistan’s internal and constitutional matters, the Prime Minister has vowed to look into the report’s recommendations and has formed a high-level committee for the purpose.
The prolonged absence of local governments in the province has impacted the population on multiple levels.
Undoubtedly, the prolonged absence of local governments in the province has impacted the population on multiple levels. At the immediate level, it has deprived citizens of their fundamental right to participate in decisions affecting their daily lives. Without local platforms, local representatives are left unable to speak for their people, despite possessing a firsthand understanding of local needs and issues. At the macro level, on the other hand, this persistent deprivation has reinforced two critical, self-perpetuating structures.
First, authority has concentrated within a small but dominant group of elites who remain largely disconnected from ground realities, yet make decisions of local importance. Second, it has given rise to a phenomenon where the role of local representatives has transitioned from a formal role to an informal one. Where local government elections once allowed these representatives a formal platform to resolve people’s issues at the local level, their exclusion has transformed this function into an informal mediation role. Field-level observations will reveal to any observer that most local representatives who served when local governments were functional in the past such as after the local government elections of 2001, or more recently after the 2015–16 local government elections continue to work informally in their constituencies, resolving people's day-to-day issues such as infrastructure, documentation, or even local disputes. However, this is now done solely through community recognition and personal social networks, rather than formal legal authority granted by statute.
It would not be wrong to argue that these local connections have become a double-edged sword for local representatives. While these networks enable them to resolve community-level issues, they are also a major reason for their political marginalization. Most politicians at the provincial and federal levels deliberately keep them in subordinate positions to avoid power-sharing, reaching out only when local mobilization is required. This is because these local figures possess a strong local support base, enabling them to mobilize the masses for their counterparts at the provincial and federal levels.
Such selective engagement and the persistent denial of a formal role have impacted not only local representatives but also the local population directly. Appointed administrative officials, who currently manage local government offices, are generally not in a position to make long-term decisions of local importance due to their short tenures and lack of a direct stake in the community. Hence, it is clear that the informal role of local representatives must finally be recognized and transformed into a formal one; only then can people's local issues be resolved and the true spirit of democracy be achieved.