Genuine governance

ON the surface, the Punjab cabinet’s decision to allocate funds for local government elections is a welcome step towards restoring a democratic tier of governance that has remained absent for more than four years — in fact, for much longer in practical terms.

After years of premature dissolution, court-mandated reinstatement, repeated delays and legal and administrative manoeuvring, the allocation suggests that Punjab is finally preparing to hold polls that were constitutionally due by April 2022. The timing, however, is difficult to ignore.

The announcement comes only days after the interior minister, with the public endorsement of DG ISPR, argued that creating new provinces or administrative units could improve governance. The sudden will to revive LGs may well be aimed at demonstrating that devolution to the grassroots can improve governance and that LGs offer an alternative to redrawing provincial boundaries as proposed by certain quarters.

That argument would have carried weight had Punjab chosen to establish a genuinely empowered LG system. Unfortunately, it has done the opposite. The existing Punjab LG law is devolution only in name. While it provides for elected councils, it concentrates meaningful administrative and financial authority in the hands of the provincial government and bureaucracy, making elected local representatives dependent on the goodwill of officials for even routine decisions.

Such an arrangement defeats the very purpose of LGs, which is to bring decision-making closer to the citizens. Punjab’s legislation compares unfavourably even with that of other provinces where LGs enjoy relatively greater governance space. The country’s largest province has opted for perhaps the most centralised model of local governance.

The experience of the past six decades illustrates why merely holding elections is not enough. Successive governments have dissolved local bodies and amended or replaced LG laws at their whim. Thus a constitutional obligation has been repeatedly ignored and grassroots democracy treated as an optional exercise rather than a permanent feature of governance. Meaningful devolution requires much more than elected councillors.

A truly functional third tier of government must have constitutionally protected administrative and financial autonomy. LGs should be able to raise, allocate and spend resources without provincial interference. The local bureaucracy and police should be accountable to elected local representatives rather than exclusively to the province. Without such authority, elected councils are little more than advisory bodies with limited capacity to address citizens’ issues.

The governance challenges of Punjab — and of other provinces — stem from the excessive centralisation of power. Holding polls under a law that denies genuine autonomy to LGs may satisfy a constitutional formality. But it will not resolve the governance deficit that has fuelled demands for more provinces to improve governance.

Published in Dawn, August 10th, 2026