Devolution, not division

Every few years, when governance in Pakistan looks particularly strained, the conversation drifts toward the same proposal: carve out new provinces. The logic sounds intuitive. Smaller units, closer to the people, easier to administer. But this argument, however emotionally satisfying, tends to skip over a more basic question. Why a system Pakistan already has on paper, a genuine three-tier structure with elected local government at its base, has never actually been allowed to work?

The Constitution is not silent on this. Article 140-A of the Constitution of Pakistan 1973 obliges every province to establish local governments and to hand over political, administrative and financial authority to elected representatives at that level. This is not some aspirational provision waiting to be discovered. It is a settled constitutional command, and it exists precisely because governance works best when decisions are made closest to the people affected by them. National defence and foreign policy sit with the federation. Broader policy sits with the provinces. But sanitation, local roads, municipal services and community development are, by their nature, local problems that need local solutions. That is the entire premise behind a functioning local government tier, and it is worth remembering that this premise was written into the Constitution for a reason, not added as an afterthought.

What Pakistan has instead is a pattern of provinces treating local government as a threat rather than a partner. Councils get elected, then dissolved before their term is out. Laws get rewritten every time a new political party comes to power, usually in a way that narrows rather than expands local authority. Development funds that should flow to union councils and municipal bodies stay parked at the provincial level, controlled by bureaucrats and members of the provincial assembly. And this last point deserves more attention than it usually gets. When legislators start spending their time securing road repairs and school grants for their constituencies instead of legislating and holding the executive accountable, the whole architecture of representative government gets distorted. MPAs and MNAs end up doing the job of a local councillor, and nobody is left to do the job of an MPA/MNA properly.

Seen this way, the push for new provinces starts to look like a workaround for a problem that already has a constitutional solution sitting unused. Before Pakistan takes on the enormous cost of building an entirely new provincial apparatus, complete with a high court, a secretariat, a police service, tax machinery and thousands of new public sector positions, it is worth asking whether that same money and political energy could instead go toward making existing local governments genuinely functional. A new province is not a light administrative adjustment. It is a permanent, recurring financial commitment, and for regions with a narrow economic base and heavy reliance on agriculture, it risks creating a unit that survives mainly on federal transfers rather than its own revenue, with little prospect of ever becoming fiscally self-sufficient.

None of this means that demands for new provinces are without merit. Areas like South Punjab carry long histories of seeking recognition, and those aspirations are rooted in real feelings of exclusion, not manufactured grievance. But recognition and representation are not the same thing as better governance, and conflating the two risks disappointing the very communities such demands claim to serve. A new map does not automatically produce a more responsive police station or a better functioning municipal office. Only working institutions do that, and institutions take patient reform, not redrawn boundaries, to actually function well.

The more honest starting point is to ask why local government in Pakistan keeps getting weakened rather than strengthened, and to be clear about who benefits from that weakness. Provincial governments rarely have much incentive to devolve real power downward, since doing so means giving up control over resources and political visibility.

Pakistan does not lack a constitutional model for better governance. It lacks the political will to implement the one it already has.