Local governance: Speakers discourage throwing away baby with bathwater

Say that if allowed to take roots, an accountable, resourceful local governance structure may deliver better.

ISLAMABAD:

The institution of union council nazim might prove to be effective in dealing with community problems if the local government system is given some time.

But domestic policies about governance need to take into account the social norms and kinship politics that often override official and formal administrative rules and regulations in the country.

These were some suggestions that came up during a presentation by Dr Shehryar Khan Toru, a at Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) Monday at the SDPI office.

Toru was presenting the findings of his ethnographic case study on the domestic water supply in an urban union council in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

Through the research, Toru tried to examine the way social norms affect institutional power of the water supply, the role of nazim in management of the supply and the limitations of the governance model.

Toru said the case study was conducted over a nine-month period in 2010-11 in Union Council Nawanshehr of Abbottabad district.



The researcher spent time observing the working of the town committee, which is responsible for the water supply management in Nawanshehr and is being run as a bureaucratic organisaiton under the Tehsil Municipal Administration after the 2002 decentralisation reforms.

He said he found that informal social norms, kinship ties and political affiliations often pressurized officials to ignore or break the formal rules of business that were otherwise available to manage the water supply.

The existing distribution system for drinking water was designed by a former nazim to benefit his voters and get some personal benefits, the research showed. The nazim at the time the study was conducted tried to fix the problem through a new project but that only ended up providing water to only two out of four affected neighbourhoods, both of which had residents that were personally or politically related to him.

The remaining affected residents kept complaining to the town committee but the “system for complaints was heavily politicised,” Toru said, and the administrative practice was linked with political and personal relationships.

Toru said a Nazim’s involvement in administration demonstrates that local government is dominated by differences in power relations. However, the actions of nazims indicate that they seem to be accountable to their voters in a way that stands parallel to the official, formal channel of accountability. It makes the accountability issue problematic, Toru said, but also offers some hope.

“This system can work because a nazim feels accountable to the community,” Toru said. “If the system is allowed to continue long enough, there is a chance you will have elected people who will prefer the interests of public at large instead of providing benefits to their voters only.”

Analyst Mukhtar Ahmed said new norms can be set in society by attempting to change the political culture and by increasing accountability. He said changes in official rules, such as making taxation local, could also help overcome some problems.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th, 2014.