Every decade, Pakistan rediscovers the governance debate. The actors change, the slogans evolve and the proposed solutions differ, but the underlying question remains remarkably unchanged: how should power be organised to govern Pakistan more effectively? The latest proposition that creating new administrative provinces will reverse governance failure appears intuitively attractive. Larger provinces are assumed to be difficult to govern; therefore, smaller provinces should improve administration, service delivery and state responsiveness.

The citizens are both the source and the purpose of state authority. Yet in Pakistan, the citizen remains largely absent from debates on governance reform. The current debate revolves around who exercises power and how that power is shared between the Federation and the Provinces. It rarely asks the more fundamental democratic question: how does power become accountable to the citizen?

Citizens experience governance differently from governments. Citizens are rights holders; public institutions are duty bearers. Governments tend to view governance through constitutional arrangements, political authority and administrative structures. Citizens experience it through the everyday lived experiences. A citizen does not experience the Constitution through its articles or legal guarantees. The Constitution becomes meaningful when a child is admitted to school, a birth is registered without delay, a Basic Health Unit functions, drainage systems withstand the monsoon, police respond impartially, women can access reproductive health services and report violence without fear, and elected representatives possess both the authority and the resources to resolve local problems. Governance therefore begins not in Islamabad or the provincial capitals.  Governance is anchored at local level and succeeds when institutions possess both the authority and the accountability to fulfil those obligations. When they do not, citizens experience governance failure and have declining trust in public institutions.

In Pakistan, governance debates are overwhelmingly framed through national politics. Public discussion revolves around Parliament, provincial assemblies, chief ministers, governors and constitutional amendments. Administrative debates ask whether provinces should be divided further, districts reorganized or new divisions created. These questions assume that governance automatically improves when administrative units become smaller and more manageable.

The recent debate is generated by the Federal Interior Minister attributes Pakistan's governance crisis to administrative inefficiency and proposes the creation of new provinces as a corrective measure. The diagnosis, however, risks confusing geography with governance. Pakistan's governance deficit is institutional rather than territorial. The country has experienced repeated constitutional, administrative and political restructuring since independence, yet the relationship between citizens and the state remains characterised by weak accountability, fragmented service delivery and persistent institutional distrust.

Much of the public debate, amplified by sensationalist media narratives, mistakes symptoms for causes. Pakistan's governance challenges are real, but they cannot be understood without recognizing that the country has spent much of its constitutional history oscillating between military-led centralization and civilian political competition. Governance reform has repeatedly been subordinated to political survival. Creating additional provinces may redistribute existing political influence and generate new centers of power, but it will not, by itself, improve governance unless it embeds empowered local governments within its constitutional........

© The Friday Times