Policy sector woes

Folks in the policy domain of Pakistan, including think tanks, development consultancies, non-government organisations and government agencies, themselves love populating their calendars with engagements like roundtable discussions, stakeholder meetings and elaborate (elitist) conferences — all for little besides their own personal benefit. That next big contract from a multilateral donor is what the eternal quest revolves around. Once secured, they move to the second most important priority: presence. Photo-ops and interview clips. Fancy infographics and endless tabular data. Acronyms and hashtags. Partnerships and joint-initiatives. “Put it all out there in a social media blast,” says the seth to his Communications Head.

It’s always about me, my altruism, my organization and my financial interest. Any semblance of concern for the ordinary person, whom they are allegedly doing all this for, arrives as an afterthought. Whatever crumbs remain once everybody ‘important’ has taken their share of the pie (usually loaned from multilateral donors) is directed to end consumers — but only after they have agreed to praise the programmes in front of designated media companies making their way to the site shortly. And even then, only to the relevant patriarch: whomever it is that happens to hold coercive power in the setting.

This is what passes as ‘development’ in the Global South today. The tragedy is that it is all made possible by countries that have painstakingly branded themselves as torchbearers of liberty, egalitarianism and democratic values: ideas that seem to dissipate when ‘projects’ that are ill thought-out at best and outright dangerous at worst are being doled out to authoritarian regimes in poor regions of the world that rarely, if ever, possess a genuine mandate. Runaway indebtedness is the natural by-product, which the toiling masses are invariably made to pay for via inhumane indirect taxation on goods and services.

Genuine reform initiatives that have the potential to disrupt institutional arrangements in favour of higher degrees of competition, meritocracy and dynamism are never tabled in ‘development sector’ domains. This is largely because structural change is antithetical to the interests of elites that have captured Pakistan’s polity — a fact that can be gauged by the tendency of all multilateral donor agencies to approach policy in a purely apolitical manner. Technical expertise, disconnected from contextual details and power relations, geared around tinkering at the margins. Project clean-up for a corrupt, oppressive, exclusionary system. Endless band-aids seeking to ‘relieve’ disenfranchised communities rather than fostering their ability to participate in society in a conducive manner.

Neo-colonialism is the phenomenon of powerful countries — particularly the imperial Western block — influencing, and in many cases dictating, the policy directions of their counterparts in the Global South. This is achieved by strategically crowding out the knowledge production arena by using their financial leverage to capture the best talent, subsume them under their predatory ideologies, and constantly incentivise them to churn out reports, policy briefs, and socioeconomic prescriptions in the broadest sense that are designed to exacerbate inequalities and general societal misery. With no counter offensive from government representatives, the myriad players in the ‘development’ domain naturally only have a short-term, opportunistic strategic orientation motivated only by self-interest.

In order to take a departure from this quagmire, a radical rethinking of the policy domain should be step number one. The activities of foreign donors must be curtailed by imposing a fee on all ‘development’ projects equivalent to a proportion of proposed budgets. With those that come in the form of loan agreements, the percentage should be even higher. This will create a disincentive for opportunistic agenda peddling, assist in addressing Pakistan’s persistent twin deficits crisis, and revive Pakistan’s sovereignty — which has systematically been chipped away over the years due to the perverse incentives of the domain.

Any government that is interested in economic revival must acknowledge that foreign ‘aid’ is never value neutral, and only functions to line the pockets of the same elites that have created the situation Pakistan finds itself in today.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 3^rd, 2023.

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