Devolution row: An assessment of Pakistan's 2001 Local Government Ordinance

The Pakistani state has been increasingly regarded as dysfunctional, with a powerful elite at its centre dictating the rules of the game to the rest of the country. The international community, in its turn, has often looked at decentralization as one of the most effective instruments to introduce institutional reforms and a more direct form of democracy in similar political contexts. Pakistan has not refused to experiment with decentralization efforts. However, as the report shows, it has done that on its own peculiar terms. All the decentralization attempts in the country have in fact been promoted by military regimes. The report looks at the reasons for such an intriguing combination and it examines in depth the rationale and implementation of the latest of such military-led efforts: the 2001 Local Government Ordinance, which was launched by President Musharraf. Eventually, the report concludes, while decentralization in itself has definitely the potential to empower local communities and to promote participatory democracy, as a political formula it can easily be bent to reproduce the same dysfunctional patterns that it was supposed to counter.