Urban autonomy

Should there be competition among Pakistani cities? Should cities, being biggest clusters of population, have autonomy with a strong mayor who is able to deliver the public goods and raise finances for the same? Should cities, as former Planning Commission boss Nadeem Ul-Haq maintains, be conceptualized as engines of growth?

The answer to these for most people will be a resounding yes. Cities are already de facto engines of modern economies since the two key sectors - manufacturing and service sectors - are found in or around cities. In light of this, there have been two important developments of late.

First, there are growing murmurs of Charter Cities that some urban policy researchers like Naveed Iftikhar are pushing, especially in the context of Gwadar. Murmurs because the idea hasn’t gained full blown traction as yet. Simply put, the concept of a Charter City revolves around a city whose governance infrastructure is born from the city’s own separate charter rather than the general law of the land. For details, follow the economist Paul Romer who has been working on this subject abroad and those ideas are seeping in Pakistan’s discourse.

The second revolves around urban autonomy, not necessarily granted through a charter but through fiscal and political devolution of powers to local level. This agenda is being advocated by the Islamabad-based think tank Prime Institute that launched its ‘Cities as drivers of growth’ report in Karachi this week.

The report compares Pakistan’s leading cities across a wide array of indicators that can be classified into (a) economic dynamism, (b) infrastructure efficiency, and (c) livability aspects. It is a useful guide for those who want to dissect the anatomy of Pakistan’s leading cities and assess what’s wrong or right with them. But while there are advantages of both conceptions of giving power to cities, whether there is a constituency for urban autonomy in provinces is really the biggest question.

Speaking at the report launch in Karachi Zia Banday, Director at Prime, maintained that political leaders will have to create cross party alliances to ensure that cities, in this case Karachi, get more political, fiscal and administrative powers through further devolution.

As a think tank, Prime understands that its position may not be met or even understood immediately, considering that the focus of real politic today and in the ensuing months will surely not be cities but who gets Islamabad, the future of PML-N, civil-military ‘space’ allocation, and of course ‘takht-e-Lahore’ to name a few. Cities as drivers of growth are good but too cute for immediate term, and that’s okay because even the business of contemporary think tanking isn’t always the immediate term.

However, even as a long-term agenda the question remains whether or not there is a constituency for urban autonomy. The apparent answer to that seems a resounding no. The people within the geography of Pakistan are hard wired into looking up to a strong centre – from British to Mughal and pre-Mughal times.

Even today, many years after the 18th amendment that finally corrected a historical wrong; the man on the street blames the government in Islamabad for the problems that lie squarely within the provincial or local government domain. That social consciousness of political and civic engagement with local or provincial level does not have strong existence in many parts of the country, and in many others it doesn’t exist at all. Hence, the absence of bottom-up demand for local government.

Even the media has been found wanting in so far mediating between the citizens and the provincial governments are concerned. Business chambers and other organisations too still mostly engage with the centre whereas the public services that businesses use are now in the provincial domain and the state of provincial fiscal affairs affect the provincial economy in which these businesses operate in.

Ergo the question is whether urban autonomy comes about in the absence of provincial autonomy, which by the way is still not a completely finished agenda, according to some policy wonks. Or is it that there are enough long-term political incentives in place because of which urban autonomy can bypass the provincial autonomy in the sequence of Pakistan’s quest for devolution. These are not easy questions to answer!