Pathologies of development practice: Higher order obstacles to governance reform in the Pakistani electrical power sector

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

Contesting access to power in urban Pakistan

Studies of informal housing and urban citizenship in South Asia frequently link the precariousness of squatter life with the struggle to formalise engagement with the state. However, this article argues that the transition to a more formal mode of making claims on the state is a shift in terrain that is no less negotiated and contested. Through an ethnography of access to electrical power in Islamabad, Pakistan, this article explores the pervasiveness of informality in access to service delivery for a squatter settlement and its bourgeois neighbours. The politics of access to urban infrastructure reveal a state of pervasive predation and a collective imaginary which puts little credence in formality.</jats:p

Democrats without Democracy? A Multi-level Analysis of Attitudes towards Democracy in Muslim-majority Countries

In this paper I study between and within country differences in attitudes towards democracy, focusing specifically on Muslim-majority countries and the degree to which college educated and high-income individuals in these countries conform to the expectations of modernization theory in their support for democracy. I find that support for democracy among high-income and college educated individuals is reduced in Muslim-majority countries relative to their peers around the world, but that this finding is due to an environment of political instability as well as levels of national income and democracy

Access to Power: Governance and Development in the Pakistani Electrical Power Sector

This dissertation explores governance in Pakistan through a study of the state-run electrical power sector. At both the micro and macro level, the Pakistani power sector provides a lens into the heart of the Pakistani state and its governance institutions. This ethnographic and historical study offers an in-depth look at state operations in a developing country, situates the current Pakistani power crisis in a larger context of continuity through periods of dictatorship and democracy, and suggests how efforts to make state service delivery more responsive to citizens might be reconceived. A historical review of the Pakistani power sector establishes first and foremost that the current crisis is the product of longer-term processes for which the policy solutions currently being proposed (with the support of international donors and multilateral lenders) are inadequate. Depoliticized attempts at power sector reform have little to offer in light of the pervasively informal and negotiated nature of the fragmented Pakistani state. The institutions of power sector governance are mutually constituted by the formal rules and the informal - personal relationships, language, violence, money, and power. These rules of the game are as relevant to relations within and between public sector organizations as they are to the engagement of citizens with their state. The same rules apply at the margins of the state - informal squatter settlements - as at the core, though the resources brought to bear and the resultant outcomes are different. The internal incoherence of this state underscores the limitations of formal rules in determining outcomes, and the poor prospects for reform efforts that focus exclusively on the formal aspects of governance. To proactively engage with the question of political will leads away from top-down policy perspectives and counter to the depoliticizing tendencies that currently shape policy reforms. Instead, an energized and informed local participation can be a counterweight to the inertial tendencies of a Pakistani state whose reforms tend to be co-opted by existing power centers rather than result in changed outcomes

Governance as an emergent compromise: Modernization and flexibility in the Pakistani electrical power sector

Developing countries are often characterized by a mix of bad governance and development initiatives seeking to accelerate modernization. When inevitable cracks in the modernization process appear, they create opportunities for informalities to seep in where the influence of power relations and culture can lead to new forms of predation or allow governance compromises to emerge. The article explores this at the national and local levels of the Pakistani electrical power sector, with each level conceptualized as a field of strategic action. The aim is to recognize the importance of emergent compromises for producing workable accommodations of competing interests, improving access to services, and addressing questions of social justice. Flexibility in responding to these cracks in the modernization process is not always a failing, but can be desirable and possibly necessary. </jats:p