The concept of devolution of powers at gross roots level was floated in late 1999. The then newly constituted National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB) initiated a debate and a process of consultation with stakeholders including politicians, media and civil society that resulted in promulgation of the Local Government Ordinance and holding of multistage elections to local bodies.

Now that the structure of political decentralization has been partially established, it is time to see whether it is successfully delivering. NRB also initiated a process of brainstorming at a three-day workshop recently held at Bhurban. This essay draws on the discussions took place at the workshop.

After almost two years of working of the process, it is quite evident that the system is not delivering as it was expected to be. There are many reasons for inefficient public service delivery through the devolution process. The most important among these reasons is the vague rules of business. Nobody knows what are his/her responsibilities. Due to vagueness in the rules of business, tensions are cropping up in the relations between district Nazims and District Coordination Officers (DCOs) and Nazims and District Police Officers (DPOs). If in some of the districts, the relationships between Nazims and bureaucrats are cordial and system is delivering, it is by chance that a good and frictionless team is in place. But in most cases, the system has come to a standstill. There are no institutional arrangements and things are running on an ad hoc basis.

Critics of the system also blame civil service inertia for being responsible for the system failure. This is partly true that the devolution process has deprived the bureaucrats of the absolute powers they have been enjoying under the previous system. But tension between Nazims and district officers, looking after various departments, is due to the fact that provincial governments recruit these officers and districts have no say in hiring and firing of these officials. Moreover, some of the officials having bad repute in the eyes of the district Nazims still serve under them.

The relations between provincial and local governments are also not very smooth. An example is the tension between Mutahida Majlis-e-Aamal (MMA) government in NWFP and the district governments in the province where in President Musharraf had to intervene himself to save the system from a possible collapse. Although, the devolution plan says that local governments would work in provincial framework, yet provinces feel that devolution has further reduced the already meager level of autonomy they were enjoying.

The devolution plan included constitution of community citizen boards (CCBs) to mobilize resources in local context and cater to governance issues and citizen accountability. The role of CCBs is to ensure greater citizen involvement in the local government and to make the local governments more responsive to citizen priorities. The CCBs are to mobilize one fifth of the cost for improvement of service delivery in a public facility, or for the management of new development initiative and rest of the four fifth is to be matched by the local government. These twin roles of CCBs have an inherent conflict as they are considered to be development partners and simultaneously are supposed to be watchdogs of the process. The 20:80 partnerships could actually intensify the power structures, as there is a fear of capturing the decision making by local elite. These boards have not been constituted in most of the places. Local governments did not spend money allocated to CCBs due to their non-existence.
Civil society organizations are of the view that they should be granted the status of CCBs and should not be compelled to get themselves registered afresh under new title as CCBs. The same is the fate of Public Safety
Commissions (PSCs). Highhandedness on the part of police is continuing unabated, and Nazims feel helpless to help alleviate the police related problems of the people.

The devolution plan vested the responsibility of developmental work in the local governments. Although, in well functioning democracies, parliamentarians are likely to be engaged in

legislation, yet they are genuine stakeholders in the development process. Some of the parliamentarians are of the view that if under the devolution plan, they were not made partners in the development work alongside local governments, they fear they would lose their seats in the parliament in the next term.

They demand that they should be fully involved in the development process to attract their voters for next term. Although, direct discretionary grants to parliamentarians are not advisable, as these will ruin the devolution program and will render local governments redundant, yet there could be other ways out to tackle this situation. Since the Local Government Ordinance has a provision of CCBs and other district development committees, parliamentarians could be included in these bodies so that they don’t feel excluded from the process.

Fiscal decentralization is another thorny issue in terms of relations between province and district government. Different systems are operative in the provinces. For example, in Punjab, district allocations are one-line items in the provincial budget and not much tiers are involved in fiscal transfers. Whereas, in Sindh, not only is the accountant general office involved in disbursing the payments allocated by the provincial government, but also, the allocations come under specified heads of accounts which make it difficult for the districts to utilize funds. In neither case are districts raising resources locally.

Newly formed district governments are heavily dependent upon federal transfers. This arrangement is also a source of tension as districts complain of delays in payments due to procedural bottlenecks. Delayed payment of funds in turn hamper implementation of development projects. The district governments should have more local tax handles available to them. A portion from General Sales Tax (GST) is an option that would guarantee fiscal independence of local governments.

The NRB could be renamed as the National Local Government Regulatory Authority (NLGRA) since it only deals with devolution program. Moreover, as sector specific regulatory authorities perform functions of check and balance and look after the interests of consumers, in a similar fashion NLGRA could look after the interest of the people as local governments are discharging the main civic services in the public domain such as health, education, water supply and sanitation. The functions of this proposed authority could be such that it has a monitoring, research and evaluation department based on participatory research methods. Since the devolution process is dealing with social engineering, a social or political scientist could be the right choice to head the proposed office. NLGRA could be designed on the pattern of other sector specific regulatory authorities with the capability of rigorous research. The proposed NLGRA should have a provision of public hearing as in the case of National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) and this will give an opportunity to the people to hold the local governments answerable.

The proposed NLGRA should engage in rigorous research on the devolution process. There is a serious need to establish service delivery benchmarks as there are no such data available and one cannot assess the performance of local governments. Had there been benchmarks available, it would have been possible to comment on the performance of the local governments regarding the difference they have made in service delivery in various fields. The research department could also learn from other country experiences that are experimenting with innovative ideas.

It seems that the donors in the country have a lot of interest in the process of devolution. UNDP supported the devolution process at its inception stage and still is engaged with NRB in terms of technical support. Since the theme of the forthcoming World Development Report is “Making Service Delivery Work for the Poor”, the World Bank is also interested in supporting the devolution process in terms of financial and technical assistance. Other donors have shown a keen interest in the devolution of power to the grass roots level. If donors are genuinely eager and committed to support devolution, they should negotiate the grants to the government that have the approval of sub committees as part of the democratic process. Presently, donors directly strike deals with individual departments such as Asian Development Bank negotiated Technical Assistance (TA) loan for Forestry Sector in North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Similar negotiations are being done with other departments. This is necessary because loans and grants have long-term obligations and repercussions and this sort of dialogue at the parliamentary level would give broader ownership to the process.

The process of devolution has stopped at the district level and powers have not even devolved up to the Tehsil and Union Council tiers. If the government is serious in devolving power, it should go to the lowest tier at village level where there will be more ownership and involvement of the people in the process. The devolution process is positive in its spirit, however, there is a need to rectify ambiguities within the system. Fiscal decentralization is in limbo and sooner it is decentralized, the better it would be. It also needs to be participatory to extend wider ownership.