Institutional Design Variance in Local Governments across Pakistan: What has Social Capital got to do with it?

Authors

  • Muhammad Salman Khan

Abstract

Institutional design is a fairly recent concept in the literature on social capital and local governance. In the governance literature on the less developed states, and particularly in Pakistan, it has not acquired sufficient scholarly attention. Against this backdrop, this paper argues that the weakness of local government systems in Pakistan results in the emergence of social capital that has significant implications for service delivery. For this purpose, institutional design is defined as a deliberate act of creation of institutions, and the role of informal institutions is cited as the consequence of weakness in the institutional design of local governments. In Pakistan, local governments have always been a top-down initiative of the central governments. However, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution in 2010, and the passage of local government acts in 2012-13 across the provinces have decentralized the local governments. This marks a significant shift in the local government system in Pakistan. It is hoped that this decentralization of designing local governments will allow a faultless incorporation of social capital into the institutional design of local governments. Contrary to the neoliberal perspective, it is argued that local governments cannot create social capital, but it is an unintended outcome of the formal institutional capacity. Thus governments can at least do certain things that are helpful, and avoid certain others that are detrimental for the role of social capital in the local governance. The key concerns of this paper are: What is the role of social capital in the context of weak formal institutions of local governance in Pakistan? And what is the role of the institutional design of local governments in highlighting its significance for local governance? To answer this question, this paper draws on a wide literature on institutional design, formal-informal institutional interaction, social capital and local governments in Pakistan. A brief analysis of provincial local government acts is also presented to explicate how provincialized local government systems offer a hope for a more contextual institutional design that is sensitive to the role of informal institutions. This study concludes that social capital plays a substantial role in local governance processes not because it is promoted by local governments; instead it is an expression of informal privatization that is largely the outcome of deficiencies in governing by government. This research contributes to the literature on the local governments in Pakistan especially in the aftermath of the 18th Amendment and new developments related to local governments across the four provinces of Pakistan. An extent literature exists on the historical analysis of local governments, their functions in specific regions and weakness of local governments. This research is the first attempt to look at the local governments through an institutional design perspective in the context of Pakistan.

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Published

2020-02-14