Planning and managing urbanisation

EDITORIAL: The government didn’t really need the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to remind it that “planning and managing urbanisation are critical for Pakistan to optimise socioeconomic development”. This is basic common sense, especially in developing countries with rising populations that are trying to break into the ranks of emerging markets.

It’s just that such matters have never been given the attention they deserve in places that matter. That’s why the bank’s other revelation in its latest report — Pakistan National Urban Assessment Pivoting Toward Sustainable Urbanisation – that the country’s “population and urbanisation challenges are increasing”, is also something that’s rarely ever been debated in parliament.

It seems there’s no important avenue that hasn’t been left unattended by successive administrations.

It’s true that all the time the country’s population exploded and put pressure on urban centres, the development of those cities was never geared towards absorbing the big transfers of population. They are full of “illegal and informal settlements that do not comply with planning rules or building codes”, which deliver substandard living conditions, disrupt city life, and degrade the urban environment.

Ominously, the report also warned that Pakistan’s population is set to touch the 400 million mark by 2050, when it will count as one of only eight countries likely to account for more than half the world’s population. And we’re not prepared for it in any way, especially when it comes to infrastructures of cities that will have to absorb this growth.

As it is, all provincial capitals hold disproportionately large shares of the provincial urban population, “concentrating both the political and administrative pressures of urbanisation”. And to make matters worse, the economic adjustment plans whose implementation is crucial for restoring macroeconomic stability and economic growth are still nowhere on the horizon.

The problem is local governments, rather lack of them. The ADB report duly notes that the institutional framework for urban governance has been complicated by “partial devolution”.

The 18th Amendment that mandated devolution of powers from the centre to provincial governments also required provinces to further devolve fiscal, political and administrative authority to local governments, after all, but that never happened because the political elite simply refused to share the pie with the grassroot.

“Partial implementation of provincial local government acts (LGAs) has given rise to a complex urban governance model, characterised by the involvement of multiple stakeholders in urban planning, land management, and municipal services, with unclear mandates, overlapping functions, and competing interests,” it notes.

And in the absence of the transfer of adequate funds or functionaries to local governments, the devolution of functions has created a system where neither the provinces nor local governments can deliver and efficiently manage urban services.

It says a lot about politicians always harping on about the wonders of democracy that the only time the country ever had a real local government system was when a dictator ran the show.

Ever since then, each political dispensation, the embodiment of representative government, has fought tooth and nail to keep local governments from taking shape, and only reluctantly held local bodies polls when forced to by the judiciary.

That is one reason things are in such bad shape; that the leaders of this land are not willing to give its people the right and funds to run their own affairs in accordance with their own needs, wishes and expectations.

This is very serious business and deserves the same kind of urgent attention that the wider economy does. Only it’s not just management of urbanisation that needs to be handled better, but rather the system that is supposed to deliver it.

Perhaps the people should also question their political representatives about their commitment to local governments the next time they go out to listen to their lectures and speeches about the need for true democracy in this country.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024