Abstracts
Panel: The Politics of Policy Research in Developing Countries
Research in difficult settings: Reflections on Pakistan
Saba Gul Khattak*
The paper discusses the political realities within which the research environment has developed over the last three decades in Pakistan to understand eroding research capacities in social science and public sector attempts at building or neglecting these. The paper also discusses the different categories of research and current trends in government, donors and NGO priorities for development policy and practice
The three stakeholders of development research in Pakistan—government, non-government research institutes, and donors—face a variety of challenges. Governments are overwhelmed by constant crisis and violence; non-government research institutes lack staff capacity, endowments/institutional support and often ‘forget’ their original mandate. Donors need to show tangible results to taxpayers at home therefore they fund projects that can demonstrate a success story. Quick solution-oriented work with short-term impact has higher chances of being funded. Donor constraints also extend to their relations with the host government. Their ability to access difficult areas constrains them from funding researchers and survey teams in high-risk settings as monitoring is impossible. These issues prevent the emergence of theoretically relevant research that can impact development policy formulation from developing countries’ perspectives.
 *Dr. Saba Gul Khattak is presently a Member Social Sector, Planning Commission of Pakistan; and, Visiting Research Fellow, SDPI, Islamabad. She was formerly Executive Director, SDPI.
On the value of the "unruly": Researching Pakistani women differently
Lubna Chaudhry*
The larger goal is to initiate a dialogue on how we can go beyond and perhaps even generate discourses that challenge uni-dimensional, Orientalist depictions of Muslim women in general, and Pakistani women in particular as passive victims of oppressive "Islamic cultures." I use my work with rural Pakistani women to challenge what someone has called the "purdah of research." Firstly, I share how this purdah of research in academic and advocacy quarters tends to damage our own causes as feminist-activists committed to the empowerment of women. Then, I use insights drawn from research with Pakistani women in rural and urban contexts to discuss how a closer reading of women's lives and an attention to heterogeneity of contexts and experiences generates the potential of transformative analyses with far-reaching implications. More specifically I will use field-based analysis to illustrate how my grapplings with women deemed as unruly, transgressive, or troublesome by their families and communities could be used as points of entry to understand multi-layered power relations and discourses restricting and enabling women's agency.
* Dr. Lubna Chaudhry is Assistant Professor at the Binghampton University, State University of New York, USA. She has done her Ph.D. from the University of California at Davis and teaches feminist theory and research; critical theory; and, South Asian women and social movements.
The reification of culture and neo-archaeology of the indigenous
Nazish Brohi*
This is an attempt to chart the 'invention of tradition' as a paradigm to nativize global political ends. The excavation of jihad and madressah for its radical potential has given way, post 9/11, to a neo-archaeology of organic plural Islam - a regenerative process that reconstitutes and recreates that which it is attempting to examine. Questioning the binary of tradition and modernity, the paper explores how modernity and modern political ends are among the filters that distill, congeal, refract or filter out tradition, and how the rhetoric of culture helps the narratives become hegemonic. Using Pakistan as the case-in-point, I want to study the processes of authentication of tradition in research and development, understanding they affirm a social and cultural reality - hence invented not imagined.
Sources of Data: Review of research in the development sector and empiric observations – original, unpublished work.
* Nazish Brohi is an independent researcher and has worked in the development sector for over 10 years. She has published reports on political Islam and the war on terror; on social impacts of violent conflict; on women in custodial institutions; on women refugees in Pakistan and on women’s right to and access to land. Her current research interests are women and agency; political Islam; violence, state and evolution of nation-state.
Discourse, donors and development: The conundrum of policy research in Pakistan
Raza Ahmad*
The issues relating to the development discourse constructed by individuals and institutions of the North are well known. Public policy process in Pakistan, not unlike several developing countries, is now a contested arena dominated by international donors especially the international finance institutions (IFIs). At the heart of the matter remains the moribund and depleted capacity within the state to support evidence-based policymaking processes. This has rendered the policy process and allied policy dialogue trapped in the neo-liberal framework where citizens are consumers of global finance, users or customers based on the research frameworks employed. The lack of responsive policymaking results in the disempowerment of the citizens undermining their entitlements since the policy-making process lacks representation. The continued absence or dysfunction of elected institutions compounds this trend.
In this context, this paper will undertake a brief assessment of the complexity of public policy research at the national and provincial levels in Pakistan to set the context. This institutional mapping will be complemented by a critique of dwindling policy-making capacities across the board, which in the first place led to donor ascendancy within this arena. The emergence of private sector universities and think tanks will be discussed at some length and their relative potentials and limitations will be analyzed to argue that the purportedly ‘independent’ agencies most of the times respond to the external demand for policy research.
Not unlike other developing countries, a nexus between academics, consultants and the mighty political executive has emerged that often, though not always, sidelines the representative institutions of the government such as the Parliament. This self-reproducing institutional connection is therefore an area of inquiry that has been hitherto left unexplored in the context of Pakistan and this paper will identify some initial research priorities that can be explored.
The third part of this paper will focus on two case studies which illustrate the complete disconnect of policy reform with domestic political and cultural processes; and also an avoidance of tackling state capacity as a core issue. The first case will deal with the loans provided by Asian Development Bank for reforms in the agriculture sector. A related example will be the Decentralization Support Program that bypassed state systems of capacity building. Over reliance on the consulting model in a market with a thin consultancy sector, points towards the flaws of understanding the policy formulation, transmittal and implementation process. Finally, the repeated failure of the national and provincial governments to take stock of the under-utilization of limited development expenditures and its non-inclusion in the donor agenda is identified as an area of investigation.
Pakistan is now in a situation where, the definition and extent of poverty, as well as economic and social policy interventions and instruments are increasingly preserves of external agencies that use international models to inform the domestic situation. The de jure policy evidence, process and dialogue produces a top-down, non-participatory and executive oriented developmentalism that ends up retaining the status quo and, further undermines the national capacity to undertake research and set participatory policy priorities. This split of de jure versus de facto remains central to our understanding of this policy conundrum and perhaps also offers a way forward. The paper therefore will present a set of options for the policy makers to consider if the entrenched information and knowledge asymmetries are to be rectified.
*Raza Ahmed is a development practitioner and researcher based in Lahore. Raza has worked with the Asian Development Bank, United Nations and the Government of Pakistan. He is also a journalist and writes under the nome de plume Raza Rumi.
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