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Devolution, accountability, and service delivery: Some insights from Pakistan
April 2008
The World Bank
Abstract
This paper studies the relationship between devolution, accountability, and service delivery in Pakistan. It examines the degree of accessibility of local policymakers and the level of competition in local elections, the expenditure patterns of local governments to gauge their sector priorities, and the extent to which local governments are focused on patronage or the provision of targeted benefits to a few as opposed to providing public goods. The main findings of the paper are threefold. First, the accessibility of policy-makers to citizens in Pakistan is unequivocally greater after devolution, and local government elections are, with some notable exceptions, as competitive as national and provincial elections. Second, local government sector priorities are heavily tilted toward the provision of physical
infrastructure—specifically, roads, water and sanitation, and rural electrification—at the expense of education and health. Third, this sector prioritization is in part a dutiful response to the relatively greater citizen demands for physical infrastructure; in part a reflection of the local government electoral structure that gives primacy to village and neighborhood-specific issues, and in part a reaction to provincial initiatives in education and health that have taken the political space away from local governments in the social sectors, thereby encouraging them to focus more toward physical infrastructure.
Introduction
Improving service delivery through increased accountability has been a significant implicit motivation behind the trend towards decentralization in developing countries. The standard theoretical argument for the transfer of responsibilities to lower tiers of government is that the closer proximity of local policy-makers to citizens increases the flow of information and better enables the public to monitor, and to hold to account, government officials. Conversely, elected local policy-makers, responding to this greater citizen vigilance, focus on improving service delivery in order to get re-elected.
Ambitious devolution reforms were introduced by the military government in Pakistan in 2001. While decentralization had a variety of motivations, the most important of which arguably was to create political allies of the regime at the local level to counter opponents at the national and provincial levels, the service delivery imperative cannot be ignored. This paper seeks some insights into this relationship between devolution, accountability, and service delivery in Pakistan by examining first the degree of accessibility of local policy-makers and level of competition in local elections, and second the expenditure patterns of local governments to gauge their sectoral priorities, and the extent to which they are focused on patronage, or providing targeted benefits to a few, as opposed to providing public goods.
Local governments in Pakistan do not exist in isolation, and any discussion of local government accountability must take into consideration the inter-governmental framework and the actions by higher tiers of government, particularly the provincial government, in sectors that are formally devolved. As a large literature shows, given that local governments generally have limited tax bases and must rely on inter-governmental transfers for most of their resources, this framework has important bearing on local incentives. Therefore, the relationship between devolution, accountability, and service delivery in Pakistan can only be analyzed in the context of a given inter-governmental framework and a given set of provincial interventions.
Three conclusions are drawn from the analysis. First, that the accessibility of policy-makers to citizens in Pakistan is unequivocally greater after devolution, and local government elections are, with some notable exceptions, as competitive as national and provincial elections. Second, local government sectoral priorities are heavily tilted towards the provision of physical infrastructure — specifically, roads, water and sanitation, and rural electrification — at the expense of education and health. Within these sectors, particularly in water and sanitation and rural electrification, the focus is on small, neighborhood and even household specific schemes, which can be characterized as the provision of targeted, private goods. Third, this sectoral prioritization is in part a dutiful response to the relatively greater citizen demands for physical infrastructure; in part a reflection of the local government structure whereby the district political leadership is accountable to an electoral college of directly elected union councilors whose constituency is the village and neighborhood; and in part, as elaborated in detail, a reaction to provincial initiatives in education and health that have taken the political space away from local governments in the social sectors thereby encouraging them to focus more towards physical infrastructure.
An important caveat is that this paper does not go beyond an expenditure analysis in gauging the impact of decentralization on service delivery. Sector governance, specifically managerial capacity, merit-based recruitment of service providers, and the ability hold staff to account, is perhaps even more important in improving outcomes. The reason these issues are not taken up, and as will be elaborated later, is that local governments in Pakistan have very limited authority over these staff. The paper also does not discuss social outcomes as these are very difficult to attribute solely to the actions of any one particular tier of government.
The paper is structured as follows: The next section provides the theoretical framework for the link between decentralization and service delivery. Section III briefly describes Pakistan’s local government system, focusing on the political, fiscal, and administrative aspects of decentralization. Section IV examines the question of political accountability of local governments in Pakistan, looking at both direct citizen contacting as well as electoral accountability. Section V, which is the core of the paper, addresses the issue of service delivery by analyzing the sectoral composition of development expenditures, the average size and type of typical local development schemes, and trends in non-salary recurrent expenditure to estimate the emphasis on operations and maintenance as opposed to new investments. This expenditure analysis is limited to the province of Punjab, as this is the only province where local governments exercise a significant degree of discretion over the resources at their disposal. Section VI concludes with some policy implications.
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