Patronage politics failing decentralisation

The ability to achieve allocative efficiency depends on the presence of adequate technical and institutional capacity

Decentralisation of administrative, fiscal and political powers to provincial and local governments has received considerable attention in the past two decades due to the discontent over the central government’s inadequate provision of public goods and excessive focus on patronage. In Pakistan, powers are ostensibly devolved to the local governments anticipating enhanced accountability and efficiency in the delivery of public goods and services; improved competence of public administration and mitigating the imperfections pertaining to the patronage politics. Its success as remedy for distortions in public service delivery is, however, dependent on numerous factors such as political culture, local power structure, and the role of civil society and media.

A basic trade-off with regard to the achievement of allocative efficiency in public expenditure is the choice between the provision of ‘broad’ goods, such as education and health, and the provision of ‘targeted’, such as infrastructure and energy delivery.

It is widely recognised that the state of Pakistan, since its inception, has not adequately provided social services to the poor in an efficient manner and allocation of resources has always been slanted towards the provision of narrow-targeted goods. The weak social outcomes of Pakistan have been attributed to the inefficient allocation of resources due the nature of its political economy; particularly to the vastly centralised nature of government and bureaucratic structure and the dominance of patronage politics.

Repeated devolution reforms in the country are evidently being sought to overcome the political market distortions such as information gaps, accountability failures, absence of credible political promises, allocative inefficiency of expenditure budget and patronage networks that impair the government’s provision of social services in our political and administrative structure. Patronage drives politicians to neglect public goods to broad segments of the society and tends to focus on narrow-targeted goods to target clients for electoral gains.

It is expected that, post-decentralisation, elected representatives significantly change the investment and expenditure patterns in favour of the poor and real local needs of the citizens, as locally-elected representatives being closer to the people are electorally more accountable to the local communities and marginalised social groups.



The evidence, however, suggests that the process of devolution and seeming empowerment of people did not lead to a higher priority being attached to pro-poor expenditures for human and social development. Pattern of sector allocation of funds in local budgets has not changed significantly, as the largest share of the budget is still allocated towards the provision of narrow-targeted goods pertaining to clientelist politics at the cost of broad social goods. It is observed that many of the district governments devote a significant portion of their budget to the construction of roads, streets, drainage, water supply and sanitation, which implies the same clientelist precedence given to economic infrastructure at the local level.

Moreover, the overall indicators of the quality of health and education also does not show any signs of major improvement as compared to the enhancement in the provision of water supply and sanitation. This helps us partially understand the persistence of Pakistan’s social underdevelopment post-devolution and its fall in the Human Development Index ranking from 135 in 2000 to 147 in 2017.

It implies that the factors that drive patronage politics at the centre extend to the local level, as it empowers the local politicians. Local mayors in a clientelist political landscape become more prone to provide targeted services that are tangible and visible, and are directly attributable to them. This allows local politicians to target their own factions and voter blocs to show that he gave precedence to them over others in order to retain their support.

A number of conditions need to be fulfilled in order to achieve allocative efficiency of resources. First, it depends on the level of fiscal and administrative autonomy of the local governments, particularly in terms of expenditure choices. The estimates show that Pakistan, in the context of international comparison, has only reached an intermediate level of fiscal decentralisation at about 36 per cent. Moreover, there is also the need for better mechanisms for revelation of local needs and preferences, which would lead to the budgetary allocations in favour of larger public interests and significant participation of locals in the expenditure allocations.

The ability to achieve allocative efficiency also depends on the presence of adequate technical and institutional capacity with local governments. Institutional and technical capacity is very significant for the local government in order to be able to assess the local needs and preferences, and as well being able to reflect them in the right programmes and policies.

Most importantly, identification of structural constraints such as indirect election of both district and tehsil mayors reduces the incentives of local politicians to provide broad-based services and hinders the voter ability to become better informed about the performance of locally elected officials. Focusing on incentive structures of politicians at different levels would help us identify the conditions under which decentralisation should improve general welfare by designing local governance structure more conducive to the local political and socioeconomic dynamics.

It is extremely vital to examine the capacity issues and identify the structural and institutional gaps in the previous and current devolution reforms, which would help in the formulation of a more rigorous decentralised governance structure that is more responsive to the local needs of citizens, alleviate the more chronic political market imperfections and strengthens Pakistan’s federal democracy.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 4^th, 2017.

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